Siqian Li (piano). Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 09 February 2025, 5☆☆☆☆☆. Review: William Ruff.
Photo credit: Matthew Johnson
Siqian Li (piano). Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. 09 February 2025,
5☆☆☆☆☆. Review: William Ruff.
“An hour of musical surprises and hand-blurring virtuosity.”
When I first saw what pianist Siqian Li was going to play in her Nottingham recital, I couldn’t help remembering an old Stephen Fry edition of the BBC’s QI show. He took a pack of cards and declared that every time you shuffle you produce an entirely different sequence of cards. The chances of two shuffled hands ever being the same are vanishingly small.
So what are the chances of an hour-long recital containing music by Gershwin, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Percy Grainger, Scriabin and Liszt? Although in that hypothetical universe populated by an infinite number of monkeys, it might be possible to replicate such a programme, to all intents and purposes Siqian Li’s choice of music for her hour-long recital must be a one-off, never to be repeated.
But of course the main issue is: did it work? To which the answer must be a resounding ‘yes’, judging from the huge ovation she received at the end of her concert. Such a wide-ranging programme needs a strong musical personality to hold it all together – but there was never any doubt about that. She started with Gershwin’s Three Preludes, everything about her posture and intensity of gaze matching her interpretation: sharpness of attack, physical power and sharp insight into Gershwin’s style, from the rhythmic excitement of the first piece, through the moody chill-out of the second and into the infectious Latin dancing of the third.
Liszt’s transcriptions for piano of Beethoven’s song-cycle To the Distant Beloved are a concert rarity, an act of homage of one composer to another, with Liszt taking very few liberties with Beethoven’s sublime melodies and ensuring that the piano sings and accompanies at the same time. Most people listening won’t have heard the next piece before either: Alexander Scriabin’s Sonata-Fantasy, a work in two movements inspired by the Black Sea where the composer went with his new wife for their honeymoon. Siqian Li relished the pictorial quality of the music: the calm of a night spent by the seashore, the tender moonlight and stirrings beneath the sea’s surface. In the second movement a storm breaks and the waves crash. Siqian was in her virtuosic element.
Her final two pieces were spectacular – but in very different ways. Percy Grainger’s Ramble on Love is his extraordinary version for piano of the final minutes of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, two hands and one keyboard having to perform the functions of voices and orchestra. Grainger makes near-impossible demands but the effect is magical, at least when performed by an artist of Siqian’s stature: technical wizardry at the service of profound emotion.
The last piece was Liszt’s brilliant showpiece Mephisto Waltz No 1 which describes a wild party in which the Devil, bored with the music, seizes a violin and plays a diabolically seductive tune which drives all the dancers to a frenzy. It’s one of the best-known displays of pianistic fireworks in the repertoire, its intoxicating sense of danger achieved through formidable technical control.
There was inevitably an encore, the beautiful Chinese piece Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake. It brought a peaceful conclusion to an hour of musical surprises, much beauty and hand-blurring virtuosity.
Siqian Li playing in the Sunday Morning Piano Series at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall