Why Yundi Li Got Cut
By BENJAMIN IVRY
The news, reported on Nov. 12 by British critic Norman Lebrecht, that pianist Yundi Li has been "dropped" by his recording company, Deutsche Grammophon, is sad indeed for music lovers. Mr. Li, born in 1982 in Chongqing, China, has been a precious antidote to the wildly popular, although crassly unidiomatic and unmusical Lang Lang, also a Deutsche Grammophon pianist.
Unforgettably seen in Liberace-like garb while playing kitschy folklore at the scarifying Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, Mr. Lang's career is booming, despite the release of an unconsciously devastating memoir. "Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story" by Mr. Lang with David Ritz (Spiegel & Grau) expresses the virtuoso's goal of being "number one," a ranking that makes sense only in sports or totalitarian governments. Son of a military policeman who subjected him to a nightmare program of study, Mr. Lang was ordered by his father to commit suicide after he was late for one boyhood practice session, according to the book.
Life and art in this memoir are depicted as a power struggle fueled by hatred and ego. Mr. Lang hated all his piano teachers until he won a scholarship to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, where he was assigned the famed teacher Gary Graffman. With irony that is missed by his student, Graffman suggests that had Schumann heard Mr. Lang's interpretation of his music, he would have suffered a heart attack, but "probably not a fatal one."
By contrast, Yundi Li is a refined musician at a time when such cultivation is typically drowned out by the panicked din of record companies and concert promoters. Mr. Li achieves poetic depth with romantic composers like Chopin and Liszt, as he has proved on justly acclaimed CDs for Deutsche Grammophon, as well as at his latest appearance at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 11. There, his renditions of Chopin's "Nocturne in E-flat Major, Opus 9, No. 2" and "Four Mazurkas, Opus 33" evoked a dancing world of tender nostalgia, plumbing emotions that are simply beyond the reach of coarse keyboard poseurs like Mr. Lang. Small wonder that the discerning New York piano critic Harris Goldsmith lauded Mr. Li's "patrician elegance" and "exquisite artistry from one of the greatest talents to surface in years, nay, decades." Yet at Carnegie Hall last month, instead of playing originally programmed works by Mozart and Beethoven that would have displayed his innate understanding of musical idioms and composers' personalities, Mr. Li instead performed an overly glitzy arrangement by Liszt of Schumann's song "Widmung," and Chinese folkloric kitsch of the kind that Mr. Lang churns out irrepressibly. The longest work on Mr. Li's program, Mussorgsky's monumental "Pictures at an Exhibition," was given an overstressed, distended reading, as if Mr. Li would have been more comfortable with intimate works by Schumann or Haydn had not some outside force imposed Mussorgsky's warhorse upon him.
Whether or not his former record company shares any blame for this programming change, Deutsche Grammophon clearly encountered some marketing problems with Mr. Li. Some years ago, I interviewed him in his New York manager's office. Gawky and skinny, with tousled hair under a baseball cap, Mr. Li looked like the provincial Chinese youth he was. I was amazed to see how Deutsche Grammophon soon packaged his remarkable CDs of Chopin and Liszt, adding heavy makeup and swooning poses for a forced androgynous look. This kind of mishandling augurs poorly for a whole new generation of young Asian and Asian-American keyboard performers.
They include the Chinese-born, New York-based Di Wu, a lissome young woman whose zesty, powerful, and heartfelt performances should soon lead to a recording contract, hopefully with a company that will not try to present her as a languishing, overly made-up doll. Yuja Wang, a brilliantly able pianist born in 1987 in Beijing, has just been signed by Deutsche Grammophon, although her association with the company has yet to be officially announced. Rebecca Davis, director of publicity for Universal Music Classical, states that Wang's first CD is due out this May. Even younger talents like the phenomenal prodigy pianist-composer Conrad Tao, born in Urbana, Ill., and China-born Peng-Peng Gong -- both teenagers in the Juilliard precollege division piano department who play more maturely than most adult recitalists -- also deserve more understanding handling than Yundi Li has received.
The question is whether the classical-music market has narrowed to the point where only a Chinese Liberace or "Chopinzee" (to adopt the term that James Huneker used to describe the 1920s exhibitionistic keyboard antics of Vladimir de Pachmann) can survive. Is it possible for fine artistry to coexist at a time when dazzling, if empty, display is exalted? In the era of the ubiquitous Hollywood star pianist José Iturbi (1895-1980), audiences still flocked to see sober, unflashy pianists like Rudolf Serkin or Benno Moiseiwitsch, masterly musicians who would never be mistaken for pop performers.
Deutsche Grammophon's dismissal of Yundi Li is only the latest in a series of cases where musical achievement does not equal a recording contract. About a decade ago, Sony Classical dismissed the supremely refined Taiwan-born violinist Cho-Liang Lin (b. 1960), according to Mr. Lin himself, because he was unwilling and/or unable to record the quasi-pop "crossover" works that have kept the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the Billboard charts. Around that time, I remember asking the pianist Murray Perahia, then as now an atypical Sony Classical artist who has not been forced to go down-market, whether he would soon be accompanying Britney Spears on a CD of Schubert's lieder cycle "Die Winterreise." Mr. Perahia replied, laughing, "My sons would like it if I did!" Fortunately for piano lovers everywhere, there are a number of midcareer greats like Mr. Perahia, Richard Goode, András Schiff and Peter Serkin, who have not been tainted by the circus-like hucksterism. We can only hope that they, as well as younger, deserving talents, will be nurtured, instead of being picked up and discarded as impatiently as Yundi Li has been.
Mr. Ivry is an author and arts writer living in New York.
By BENJAMIN IVRY
The news, reported on Nov. 12 by British critic Norman Lebrecht, that pianist Yundi Li has been "dropped" by his recording company, Deutsche Grammophon, is sad indeed for music lovers. Mr. Li, born in 1982 in Chongqing, China, has been a precious antidote to the wildly popular, although crassly unidiomatic and unmusical Lang Lang, also a Deutsche Grammophon pianist.
Unforgettably seen in Liberace-like garb while playing kitschy folklore at the scarifying Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, Mr. Lang's career is booming, despite the release of an unconsciously devastating memoir. "Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story" by Mr. Lang with David Ritz (Spiegel & Grau) expresses the virtuoso's goal of being "number one," a ranking that makes sense only in sports or totalitarian governments. Son of a military policeman who subjected him to a nightmare program of study, Mr. Lang was ordered by his father to commit suicide after he was late for one boyhood practice session, according to the book.
Life and art in this memoir are depicted as a power struggle fueled by hatred and ego. Mr. Lang hated all his piano teachers until he won a scholarship to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, where he was assigned the famed teacher Gary Graffman. With irony that is missed by his student, Graffman suggests that had Schumann heard Mr. Lang's interpretation of his music, he would have suffered a heart attack, but "probably not a fatal one."
By contrast, Yundi Li is a refined musician at a time when such cultivation is typically drowned out by the panicked din of record companies and concert promoters. Mr. Li achieves poetic depth with romantic composers like Chopin and Liszt, as he has proved on justly acclaimed CDs for Deutsche Grammophon, as well as at his latest appearance at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 11. There, his renditions of Chopin's "Nocturne in E-flat Major, Opus 9, No. 2" and "Four Mazurkas, Opus 33" evoked a dancing world of tender nostalgia, plumbing emotions that are simply beyond the reach of coarse keyboard poseurs like Mr. Lang. Small wonder that the discerning New York piano critic Harris Goldsmith lauded Mr. Li's "patrician elegance" and "exquisite artistry from one of the greatest talents to surface in years, nay, decades." Yet at Carnegie Hall last month, instead of playing originally programmed works by Mozart and Beethoven that would have displayed his innate understanding of musical idioms and composers' personalities, Mr. Li instead performed an overly glitzy arrangement by Liszt of Schumann's song "Widmung," and Chinese folkloric kitsch of the kind that Mr. Lang churns out irrepressibly. The longest work on Mr. Li's program, Mussorgsky's monumental "Pictures at an Exhibition," was given an overstressed, distended reading, as if Mr. Li would have been more comfortable with intimate works by Schumann or Haydn had not some outside force imposed Mussorgsky's warhorse upon him.
Whether or not his former record company shares any blame for this programming change, Deutsche Grammophon clearly encountered some marketing problems with Mr. Li. Some years ago, I interviewed him in his New York manager's office. Gawky and skinny, with tousled hair under a baseball cap, Mr. Li looked like the provincial Chinese youth he was. I was amazed to see how Deutsche Grammophon soon packaged his remarkable CDs of Chopin and Liszt, adding heavy makeup and swooning poses for a forced androgynous look. This kind of mishandling augurs poorly for a whole new generation of young Asian and Asian-American keyboard performers.
They include the Chinese-born, New York-based Di Wu, a lissome young woman whose zesty, powerful, and heartfelt performances should soon lead to a recording contract, hopefully with a company that will not try to present her as a languishing, overly made-up doll. Yuja Wang, a brilliantly able pianist born in 1987 in Beijing, has just been signed by Deutsche Grammophon, although her association with the company has yet to be officially announced. Rebecca Davis, director of publicity for Universal Music Classical, states that Wang's first CD is due out this May. Even younger talents like the phenomenal prodigy pianist-composer Conrad Tao, born in Urbana, Ill., and China-born Peng-Peng Gong -- both teenagers in the Juilliard precollege division piano department who play more maturely than most adult recitalists -- also deserve more understanding handling than Yundi Li has received.
The question is whether the classical-music market has narrowed to the point where only a Chinese Liberace or "Chopinzee" (to adopt the term that James Huneker used to describe the 1920s exhibitionistic keyboard antics of Vladimir de Pachmann) can survive. Is it possible for fine artistry to coexist at a time when dazzling, if empty, display is exalted? In the era of the ubiquitous Hollywood star pianist José Iturbi (1895-1980), audiences still flocked to see sober, unflashy pianists like Rudolf Serkin or Benno Moiseiwitsch, masterly musicians who would never be mistaken for pop performers.
Deutsche Grammophon's dismissal of Yundi Li is only the latest in a series of cases where musical achievement does not equal a recording contract. About a decade ago, Sony Classical dismissed the supremely refined Taiwan-born violinist Cho-Liang Lin (b. 1960), according to Mr. Lin himself, because he was unwilling and/or unable to record the quasi-pop "crossover" works that have kept the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the Billboard charts. Around that time, I remember asking the pianist Murray Perahia, then as now an atypical Sony Classical artist who has not been forced to go down-market, whether he would soon be accompanying Britney Spears on a CD of Schubert's lieder cycle "Die Winterreise." Mr. Perahia replied, laughing, "My sons would like it if I did!" Fortunately for piano lovers everywhere, there are a number of midcareer greats like Mr. Perahia, Richard Goode, András Schiff and Peter Serkin, who have not been tainted by the circus-like hucksterism. We can only hope that they, as well as younger, deserving talents, will be nurtured, instead of being picked up and discarded as impatiently as Yundi Li has been.
Mr. Ivry is an author and arts writer living in New York.
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