Yundi Li shows more fire than poetry

BY LAWRENCE A. JOHNSON

lajohnson@MiamiHerald.com

The fact that Yundi Li made his Miami debut Tuesday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center just three weeks after the other great Chinese pianist of our day, Lang Lang, performed on the same Knight Concert Hall stage, makes comparisons inevitable.

Ironically, both performances, presented by the Concert Association of Florida, tended to refute each artist's musical reputation. Lang Lang is best known as a flashy showman yet it was his nuanced, acutely colored Debussy that proved most memorable.

Conversely Yundi Li, ''the poet of the keyboard,'' made the strongest impression in the virtuosic pages of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and proved mixed at best in the repertoire in which he is renowned.

Li didn't get much help Tuesday from a harsh, steely Steinway and hall tuning that blurred detail and made for a decidedly muddy sound.

Perhaps the instrument or acoustic was on his mind for Li's playing felt hasty and impatient, with a few surprising slips.

In the first half of the program, the pianist stayed on stage throughout his three sets and barely paused between works as if wanting to get things over with as quickly as possible.

Li opened with Mozart's popular Sonata in C major, K.330, in a performance that was poised and elegant, but rather cool and routine, failing to plumb much depth.

Winner of the International Chopin Competition in 2000, Li offered the Polish composer's four Op. 33 Mazurkas. The perennial Mazurka in D major had the whirl of the ballroom, Li's firmly pointed left-hand adding a rustic edge to the dance rhythms.

Yet while polished and well played, considering this artist's reputation in Chopin his Mazurkas were a disappointment -- generalized and lacking the individual touch and subtle coloring to raise them above any number of well-drilled performances.

Li's Nocturne in E flat major was sensitively done with a hushed glowing coda and he showed his Lisztian bona fides in a steel-fingered account of Schumann's song Widmung.

Chopin's Andante Spianato proved more successful, the cascading notes as fresh and even as a flowing spring. The ensuing Grand Polonaise Brillant was a deft melding of bravura and elegance, with Li sailing through the tortuous complexities of the coda with impressive panache.

Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is new to Li's repertoire and at times felt like a work in progress.

There were inspired moments, as with the pensive reflection the pianist brought to the reprise of the Promenade theme, a spacious and concentrated Old Castle and vivacious Limoges.

Li attacked The Hut on Fowl's Legs with jarring fury and intensity, and brought the requisite weight and cumulative impact to the Great Gate of Kiev, surmounting its myriad of notes largely unscathed.

But many of the pictures felt like the paint was still drying as if Li was yet finding his way into the music.

The pianist's encore of a Chinese song, thrown off with a light touch, showed a welcome personality and charisma that was less apparent earlier in the evening.

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