Just came home from the concert. Li was born in 1982 in central China, won lots of competitions, and has charisma to burn. The program was pretty well all Chopin and Liszt. I’ve never heard Chopin played better, live. I’m now shopping for his recordings.
I just took this piece past the first paragraph so I could squeeze in the picture; and note that it was nice to see Vancouver’s Chinese community turn out en masse. One side-effect is that they all took out their digicams and flashed away between the numbers; some of the classical-music snobs were appalled, but I thought it was neat. Chopin and Liszt in the hands of a young virtuoso are about as close as classical music gets to arena rock, so why not the flashes?
