Interview, George Li on Movements

The young American pianist George Li came to international attention in 2015, when he took the Silver Medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition at the age of nineteen. He made his debut on Warner Classics two years later with a live recital from the Mariinsky, and last month saw the release of his first solo recording in six years - featuring music by Schumann, Ravel and Stravinsky, Movements was an Editor's Choice in the August edition of Gramophone, with Patrick Rusher declaring 'I can’t think of another pianist who portrays Ravel’s aesthetic with greater relish or sympathy'.

I spoke to George last month about the role which movement and physical fitness play in his life as a musician, the specific technical and emotional challenges presented by the pieces on the programme, why immersing himself in other art-forms over the past few years has transformed his approach to the piano, and his relationship with the two people to whom the album is dedicated...

The idea of movement is central to your programme on this album: how do you incorporate physical activity into your routine as a performer?

I think that’s a side of performance that isn’t talked about much, especially for classical music. Without wanting to suggest that performance is purely movement-coordinated, I do think that it requires a lot of stamina, coordination and many pure athletic traits that are very useful to have in your toolkit when you’re performing and touring.

Keeping in shape is very important for me: it’s quite hard to maintain a routine when I’m on tour, but I try to take advantage of any local gyms when available. When I’m at home I try to allocate a couple hours each day for pure exercise, whether it’s walking or something more intense – I’m a big soccer fan, and I love playing football with my brother. Just making sure I always have the time to maintain physical fitness also helps my stress levels: it’s about carving out space to take a deep breath amid the ongoing working cycle.

The Three Movements from Stravinsky's Petrushka in particular pose quite a few athletic challenges of their own…

Yes, I think it’s the one piece on the album where stamina is the most important thing. All of the other pieces are shorter works which have to be threaded together into a bigger tapestry (which is a different sort of challenge), but Petrushka is more about momentum-building. Especially in the last movement, you’re constantly building long lines, and the various technical challenges that come into play require a lot of effort and preparation.

For me that involves isolating each challenge and making sure that I know it inside-out before putting it all together – there are some three- or four-minute stretches in this piece where things just don’t let up! For example, the first movement is all about wrist-staccato, and that can get tiring…it takes a lot of practice to get the balance between making sure your hands are firm enough to create the sound that you want and making sure that you have the flexibility to last the distance!

But what I really love about Petrushka is the broad range of characterisation and the different instrumental colours, because of course it was originally an orchestral piece and a ballet. My idea of what a piano can do has evolved a lot over the past few years; it’s always been an interest of mine, but lately I’ve been thinking a little more about how to stretch my imagination in terms of the colours and textures that I can produce.

Approaching the piano like it’s a full orchestra has really helped me to push the boundaries of where I think my imagination can go: Petrushka’s a great vehicle for that, and I love being able to create so many different characters in such a short period of time. The whole ballet is set in a Russian village and the focus is constantly shifting between the puppet and the wizard: it’s kind of like a movie in a way, because you’re always panning between different scenes.

You've touched on ballet and cinema: which other art-forms feed into your approach to making music?

While I was at Harvard I studied English Literature, and that had a profound effect on the way I view music in general. Before I enrolled on that course I approached music in a very feeling-first kind of way: I’d always thought of it as a very abstract art-form, but what grabbed me at Harvard was exploring the overlap of creative ideas between different disciplines. For instance, when we studied the Romantics I began to realise that there are so many collisions and interactions between music and literature in that period, and that deepened my own understanding of things I was doing at the piano. So many concepts from other art-forms are hugely influential in music, and learning how to draw those connections really helps me to understand what I’m playing!

Which authors or literary works really resonated with you?

There were a couple moments on the course which stand out to me, and one was a very direct link between music and literature. I was learning Liszt’s Petrarchan Sonnets, and the sonnets themselves came up in poetry class at exactly the same time - seeing how much overlap existed was really illuminating for me.

I adored studying the Romantic poets, and in particular Wordsworth’s The Prelude. I love how delicate an artform poetry is: in a sense it reminds me of a lot of Schumann’s music or the Chopin Preludes, where you have to convey so many big emotions and ideas in a very concise, compact way. Finding that balance between the micro and macro structures is a beautiful process for me: I really enjoy doing close-readings of passages in poems and unpicking the various allusions and references, and thanks to taking these literature courses I’ve been able to apply the same approach to music.

The third literary experience which had a profound effect on me was reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Of course it’s a very dark book, but the way he brings the reader into the mind of a killer who’s filled with anxiety and guilt never fails to astonish me. Maybe there’s not such a direct link with music there, but for me discovering Dostoevsky was like discovering the language of Schumann in the sense that both have this interesting dichotomy between the very fragmented characterisations of things but also a certain underlying structure.

Schumann is a composer I’ve been performing and studying intensively over the past few years - especially since the pandemic - and exposure to his unique musical language has really opened my mind. When I was studying the Schumann Fantasie, I was struck by how he integrates what are essentially character pieces into this big structure, and there’s a connection there with other works like Davidsbündlertänze, Kinderszenen and Carnaval. It puts me in mind of Dostoevsky again, and what he does in his collections of short stories. And something else I really love about Schumann – aside from the beauty of the lyricism in his writing - is his almost omnipresent obsession with childhood and nostalgia…A lot of his pieces are written in a very simple but moving manner, and I think a lot of that is rooted in his fixation on the backward glance.

This is a hugely demanding programme on several levels: have you performed it live yet?

I just love this programme and I’ve been trying to perform it as much as I can: I did nine or ten performances before we got into the studio, and I plan to do more. Of course it’s challenging for me on a mental and physical level, because it requires so much concentration and it’s also very emotional – the main challenge is to build an overall structure so that the listener can follow what I’m trying to say.

From a listener’s point of view there’s a really nice progression from inward to outward. I think it’s interesting having something so intimate as the Schumann where there’s a lot of story-telling going on, then it opens out to a more orchestral world: very vivid, very outdoors-y and extrovert in terms of expression.

This was my first wholly studio recording, so I was a little bit apprehensive about the process and wanted to find a space where I felt at home so I could relax enough to get truly inspired: I was really lucky to be able use a concert-hall in San Francisco, which has a beautiful Steinway and made me feel like I had plenty of room to breathe.

You've dedicated the album to two of your teachers - how long have those people been in your life?

I’ve been lucky to have really great teachers on my journey so far, but there are two people in particular who stand out: Russell Sherman (who unfortunately passed away last October) and his wife Wha Kyung Byun, who’s been my rock.

I started studying with them when I was twelve, so for the past fifteen years they’ve played a really crucial role in my development as an artist and hopefully as a human being as well. They’re just so inspiring to work with: they have this very high standard of musicianship, and they supported me so much in terms of building my technique and also having it serve a musical purpose. They taught me the importance of developing my ear and imagination, and striking that all-important balance between internalising the details of the score and putting yourself into it at the very end of that process to make the music come to life. That’s always the challenge in classical music: at the end of the day, you’re taking something that’s dead and breathing life back into it.