Narratives in motion: George Li at Caramoor

With a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard in addition to a Master’s in Music from the New England Conservatory, pianist George Li credited – in an interview from several years ago – literature with having changed his way of approaching music, explaining. “I became more focused on what a particular piece of music was trying to say — the ‘story’ it was telling.” Li’s belief in storytelling felt quietly reinforced by the recital’s setting: Caramoor’s museum-like Music Room, with its shelves of books, tapestries and paintings, evoking a world where music intertwines with a palpable sense of the past. Against this backdrop, Li offered a programme of works deeply familiar to recital audiences, yet approached them not as repertory staples, but as living texts, open to rediscovery.

All three works he presented shared an episodic nature that nevertheless favoured subtle forms of continuity, with clearly defined movements or sections unfolding into a broader musical narrative. Schumann’s Arabeske cycles between lyricism and restlessness; Ravel’s waltzes float from irony to melancholy and back again, culminating in an epilogue of drifting recollections; and Mussorgsky’s gallery of scenes is held together by the evolving “Promenade” theme. In Li’s hands, these fragments did not feel isolated, but rather like shifting facets of a single, richly imagined voice, fluid yet reflective.

Li opened his recital with Schumann’s Arabeske in C major, a modestly scaled work whose simplicity can easily be mistaken for slightness. He resisted the temptation to over-shape its graceful rondo structure, allowing the lyrical main theme to unfold with ease, while giving just enough weight to the more turbulent middle section. Rather than drawing stark contrasts, Li traced subtle emotional currents through each return and departure, suggesting not conflict but a kind of inner flux, an ebb and flow closer to thought than to drama. The final reappearance of the opening theme, soft and inward, felt less like an explicit return than a memory.

In Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, Li approached the set not as a display of charm or wit, but as a subtly interwoven cycle, less a sparkling ballroom diversion than a reflective meditation. He brought out the elegant angularity of the opening waltz without hardening its edges and allowed each miniature to unfold with clarity and inward poise. Rather than treating the eight movements as detached episodes, he emphasised their motivic links – how one gesture anticipates another, how cadences overlap. The Épilogue, like the final turn of Schumann’s rondo, hovered delicately between memory and dream.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition represented a different kind of traversal: through space, imagery and storytelling. Li treated the work not as a vehicle for percussive display, but as a shifting landscape of contrast and mood. Each vignette was vividly drawn, not just in colour and rhythm, but in expressive intent as if each were a character in a story unfolding through the pianist’s touch. The Old Castle sang in long, melancholy lines; Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks flickered with quicksilver humour; Bydło trudged with real weight. The final pages – Baba Yaga and The Great Gate of Kiev – built toward grandeur through rhythmic control and structural clarity rather than volume alone.

A single encore – the delicate Mélodie from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice – felt like a final nod to the recital’s narrative sensibility. In the balance between virtuosic display and lyricism, it was the latter that ultimately prevailed.