Yundi Li: Does he tinkle your ivories?
In the crisis-laden economy of classical music concerts, pianists today are often marketed as "hunka hunka burnin' loves," however inappropriately. A few years ago, I interviewed the talented, poetic young Chinese pianist Yundi Li in his New York manager's office. Then in his early 20s, gawky and skinny, with tousled hair under a baseball cap, Yundi looked like the provincial Chinese youth he was. I was amazed to see how his recording company packaged his remarkable CDs of Chopin and Liszt, adding heavy makeup and swooning poses for an androgynous look. Yundi Li's artistry was the same, but he became a different artist to look at.
I had occasion to think further on how the pinup-boy approach can work against a performer's basic essence when I attended an April recital at Carnegie Hall by the Norwegian pianist Leif-Ove Andsnes. A strapping, lean fellow in his 30s, Andsnes looks like an Olympic skier, and his fans lustily cheered his performance, seemingly oblivious to the actual music being performed. Andsnes' musicality, inspired by such models as Sviatoslav Richter, is at its best when expressing a stern, introverted, rigorous character, ideal for the Lutheran music of Johann Sebastian Bach. In lighter pieces on that evening's program by Sibelius and Edvard Grieg, his readings were too sober and self-consciously pleasure-denying, as if struggling to suppress teenybopper adulation from the audience. One fan seated in front of me excitedly dropped his cell phone with which he had been illegally filming the concert, while a woman next to me fiddled mysteriously in her shoulder bag to adjust what was likely another illicit recording device.
Earlier that month, it was refreshing by contrast to attend a concert, also at Carnegie Hall, by one of the world's finest pianists, András Schiff, a perfectly pleasant-looking Hungarian gentleman of middle age who will never be mistaken for a glamourpuss. Schiff's audience was actually there to listen to the music, some splendidly-played Beethoven sonatas, some of them newly available on CD from ECM. The only recording device which I saw was a legitimate one, placed above the pianist's head onstage, and the audience present were blessedly focused on the music at hand, as was the pianist, instead of some glam fantasy. The lesson is that sexiness in pianists will pack in the punters, but it cannot make them listen.
