Seven years ago, pianist George Li was named a Gilmore Young Artist of the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and made his debut with the Grand Rapids Symphony, performing Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A for the symphony’s Rising Stars Series.
The 16-year-old pianist was a Rising Star indeed.
Three years later, Li took the Silver Medal at the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition. The following year, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants won an Avery Fisher Career Grant. In 2017, Warner Classics released his debut recording.
Two weeks ago, on Feb. 27, Li made a splash in Santa Barbara playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Russian National Orchestra on a U.S. tour. Two weeks from now, on March 27, he performs Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the London Philharmonic in the Royal Festival Hall under Vasily Petrenko.
But this week, he’ll be in DeVos Performance Hall, playing the perennially popular Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Grand Rapids for a concert titled Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich on Friday and Saturday, March 15-16 at 8 p.m. in DeVos Performance Hall.
“I’ve never worked with him, but I’ve heard such incredible things about him,” Lehninger said recently.
Lehninger also will lead the Grand Rapids Symphony in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. The concerts open with Moxie, a short, satirical work by American composer Kristin Kuster.
Tickets in the Richard and Helen DeVos Classical series start at $18 adults, $5 students. Call (616) 454-9451 or go online to GRSymphony.org
Perhaps most remarkably, Li, age 23, just graduated from college – from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in music from New England Conservatory through a joint degree program.
Like so many other kids, Li began piano lessons at age 4. Though it soon was clear he had a special gift, for years, it was just a hobby. Until one day at age 11, while performing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, the Boston native had an epiphany.
“All of a sudden, in the middle of the performance I felt different,” he said in a 2018 interview with National Public Radio. “I was kind of transported in some other reality. And I felt all these emotions within the piece and within myself.”
That's when Li's light bulb switched on.
“After that moment I wanted to do this for the rest of my life,” he said.
So far, the rest of his life has only been a dozen years, but they’ve been momentous.
Following a performance of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2017, the Sydney Morning Herald praised his “overarching musical concentration that engendered clarity of shape and melodic lines of expressively calibrated nuance. When required, his playing is brilliantly virtuosic but that alone does not create the absorbing listening he and the SSO under David Robertson created.”
Lehninger said he’s looking forward to having the rising star back in Grand Rapids to perform the well-known piece.
“Every pianist plays it,” Lehninger said. “So I’m looking forward to seeing what he’ll do with it.”
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