Why Yundi Li Got Cut

[ivanos (Peel quickly and see)]

Why Yundi Li Got Cut

The Wall Street Journal
Nov 28, 2008
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122790914204065299.html


The news, reported on Nov. 12 by British critic Norman Lebrecht, that pianist
Yundi Li has been "dropped" by his recording company, Deutsche Grammophon, is
sad indeed for music lovers. Mr. Li, born in 1982 in Chongqing, China, has
been a precious antidote to the wildly popular, although crassly unidiomatic
and unmusical Lang Lang, also a Deutsche Grammophon pianist.

Unforgettably seen in Liberace-like garb while playing kitschy folklore at
the scarifying Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, Mr. Lang's career is
booming, despite the release of an unconsciously devastating memoir. "Journey
of a Thousand Miles: My Story" by Mr. Lang with David Ritz (Spiegel & Grau)
expresses the virtuoso's goal of being "number one," a ranking that makes
sense only in sports or totalitarian governments. Son of a military policeman
who subjected him to a nightmare program of study, Mr. Lang was ordered by
his father to commit suicide after he was late for one boyhood practice
session, according to the book.

Life and art in this memoir are depicted as a power struggle fueled by
hatred and ego. Mr. Lang hated all his piano teachers until he won a
scholarship to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, where he was assigned the
famed teacher Gary Graffman. With irony that is missed by his student,
Graffman suggests that had Schumann heard Mr. Lang's interpretation of his
music, he would have suffered a heart attack, but "probably not a fatal one."

By contrast, Yundi Li is a refined musician at a time when such cultivation
is typically drowned out by the panicked din of record companies and concert
promoters. Mr. Li achieves poetic depth with romantic composers like Chopin
and Liszt, as he has proved on justly acclaimed CDs for Deutsche Grammophon,
as well as at his latest appearance at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 11. There, his
renditions of Chopin's "Nocturne in E-flat Major, Opus 9, No. 2" and "Four
Mazurkas, Opus 33" evoked a dancing world of tender nostalgia, plumbing
emotions that are simply beyond the reach of coarse keyboard poseurs like Mr.
Lang. Small wonder that the discerning New York piano critic Harris Goldsmith
lauded Mr. Li's "patrician elegance" and "exquisite artistry from one of the
greatest talents to surface in years, nay, decades." Yet at Carnegie Hall
last month, instead of playing originally programmed works by Mozart and
Beethoven that would have displayed his innate understanding of musical
idioms and composers' personalities, Mr. Li instead performed an overly
glitzy arrangement by Liszt of Schumann's song "Widmung," and Chinese
folkloric kitsch of the kind that Mr. Lang churns out irrepressibly. The
longest work on Mr. Li's program, Mussorgsky's monumental "Pictures at an
Exhibition," was given an overstressed, distended reading, as if Mr. Li would
have been more comfortable with intimate works by Schumann or Haydn had not
some outside force imposed Mussorgsky's warhorse upon him.

Whether or not his former record company shares any blame for this
programming change, Deutsche Grammophon clearly encountered some marketing
problems with Mr. Li. Some years ago, I interviewed him in his New York
manager's office. Gawky and skinny, with tousled hair under a baseball cap,
Mr. Li looked like the provincial Chinese youth he was. I was amazed to see
how Deutsche Grammophon soon packaged his remarkable CDs of Chopin and Liszt,
adding heavy makeup and swooning poses for a forced androgynous look. This
kind of mishandling augurs poorly for a whole new generation of young Asian
and Asian-American keyboard performers.
Related Article

They include the Chinese-born, New York-based Di Wu, a lissome young woman
whose zesty, powerful, and heartfelt performances should soon lead to a
recording contract, hopefully with a company that will not try to present her
as a languishing, overly made-up doll. Yuja Wang, a brilliantly able pianist
born in 1987 in Beijing, has just been signed by Deutsche Grammophon,
although her association with the company has yet to be officially announced.
Rebecca Davis, director of publicity for Universal Music Classical, states
that Wang's first CD is due out this May. Even younger talents like the
phenomenal prodigy pianist-composer Conrad Tao, born in Urbana, Ill., and
China-born Peng-Peng Gong -- both teenagers in the Juilliard precollege
division piano department who play more maturely than most adult recitalists
-- also deserve more understanding handling than Yundi Li has received.

The question is whether the classical-music market has narrowed to the point
where only a Chinese Liberace or "Chopinzee" (to adopt the term that James
Huneker used to describe the 1920s exhibitionistic keyboard antics of
Vladimir de Pachmann) can survive. Is it possible for fine artistry to
coexist at a time when dazzling, if empty, display is exalted? In the era of
the ubiquitous Hollywood star pianist Jos踠Iturbi (1895-1980), audiences
still flocked to see sober, unflashy pianists like Rudolf Serkin or Benno
Moiseiwitsch, masterly musicians who would never be mistaken for pop
performers.

Deutsche Grammophon's dismissal of Yundi Li is only the latest in a series
of cases where musical achievement does not equal a recording contract. About
a decade ago, Sony Classical dismissed the supremely refined Taiwan-born
violinist Cho-Liang Lin (b. 1960), according to Mr. Lin himself, because he
was unwilling and/or unable to record the quasi-pop "crossover" works that
have kept the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the Billboard charts. Around that time, I
remember asking the pianist Murray Perahia, then as now an atypical Sony
Classical artist who has not been forced to go down-market, whether he would
soon be accompanying Britney Spears on a CD of Schubert's lieder cycle "Die
Winterreise." Mr. Perahia replied, laughing, "My sons would like it if I
did!" Fortunately for piano lovers everywhere, there are a number of
midcareer greats like Mr. Perahia, Richard Goode, Andr颇 Schiff and Peter
Serkin, who have not been tainted by the circus-like hucksterism. We can only
hope that they, as well as younger, deserving talents, will be nurtured,
instead of being picked up and discarded as impatiently as Yundi Li has been.

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推 mizarfar:英文不佳。這篇大略的意思是因為李雲迪不符合DG想要的市
→ mizarfar:場走向所以才不繼續合作嗎？ @@"
推 Lipatti:寧要郎朗 捨棄李雲迪 DG未來一定會後悔的...
→ ivanos:這篇文章對於DG的市場觀也有懷疑。最後一段則是透露出
→ ivanos:對年輕一代的不走市場路線的好音樂家的擔心與期待
推 onehundred:我那天聽了李雲迪的拉威爾鋼琴協奏曲. 詮釋得很淺.
推 aazz1988:朗朗的拉二也不知道他在彈什麼
→ decorum:郎朗把音樂會搞得像馬戲團，國外一堆人叫他 Bang Bang
→ YTJEN:其實，李雲迪跟DG合約結束，今年初就已經公開了。
→ YTJEN:跟DG解約，也有一說是他將經紀公司換成Askonas Holt後，
→ YTJEN:公司老闆的建議。提供參考。
→ YTJEN:畢竟，他跟DG簽的是片約，而2004年已經延過約。
→ sneak: 場走向所以才不繼續合作 https://noxiv.com
→ sneak: 畢竟，他跟DG簽的是片 http://yofuk.com
→ muxiv: 對年輕一代的不走市場路 https://moxox.com