Review by Simon Jenner, 28th May 2025
Miaoyan Li is still a second year Masters student at Trinity Laban. And her first degree wasn’t in music, but Biology at Liverpool University. So only recently has she switched to music full-time. But that makes her ascent all the more exciting. Li ‘s a fully-fledged artist with a distinct repertoire. After accompanying here last year, she arrives at St Nicholas to give a solo concert during the Festival.
First Li plays Shostakovich’s Prelude and Fugue No 18 in F minor of his Op 87 set of 24, composed in 1951-52 for Tatiana Nikolayeva. Hearing her traverse Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues for the 1950 Bach bicentenary, Shostakovich composed a 24 of his own. For a long time this wasn’t appreciated in the West. Now it’s lauded as a classic of 20th century piano composition.
The relatively brief F minor winds with a shadowed, unhurried prelude. It’s Andante, but purposeful; before embarking on a delicately-voiced, high-octave Fugue of arrival. Tinctured with very Russian F minors, this is a quietly intimate work, yet fleeter than some of its brooding minor keyed companions: a great curtain raiser.
Prokofiev’s sound world influenced Shostakovich. The second of his nine completed Sonatas, in D minor Op 14 dates from 1914 when Prokofiev was 23 but already a master, with the detail of his own voice: sharp, insouciant and unapologetically buoyant. Even brattish. But also breathtakingly lyrical.
The Allegro ma non troppo is full of braggadocio but sardonic and almost tripping itself up. It’s a fiendish virtuoso piece. The following Scherzo Allegro Marcia is all skirling laughter and running scales with (like the first movement) harmonic ambushes… and high spirits. Rather like those of a playful lion. It’s meant to be a march and it struts all right, but to a demented sergeant-major’s commands.
The succeeding slow movement is an Andante but also driven. It ports the humours of an adagio but broods at a walking pace. As if working out an existentialist threat by meditation. The melody turns on itself and slows, profound and inconsolable. Wherever this comes from, it seems a revelation amidst bustle. A heart of a rather heartless world teeming round it. The enharmonic single high notes suggest the qualities Shostakovich found later in his Fugues. It rises to a climax not unlike that of the wartime Seventh Sonata’s tragic slow movement.
The final Vivace attempts to banish all this, skittering joyfully till it creates chord clusters (almost) with jarring crunches in its uninhibited high jinks. After a sudden reflective passage that sounds uncannily like a slow descending passage in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, we’re dismissed: with a winding-up to a jester’s fermata. Li takes this at a steady pace extracting the maximum humour and playfulness.
Mompou’s Cancion y Danza No. 5 from 1944-50 (when Mompou himself recorded it on February 6th that year) comes like a balm between stormy worlds. Li exalts in the high notes’ simple joy though also emphasizes the earthiness of the dance, as if it inhabits two worlds: the spirit and the dance of earth. Lyrically pointed yet not as delicate as some Mompou, it tends to be one of his most popular.
Bartok’s Out of Doors Suite Sz81 BB89 from 1926 is similar in dare and tone to the Prokofiev. ‘With Drums and Pipes’ tramples its military barbarism with a smirking hi nailed March past, triumphant yet menacing with the rhythms of a military band drumming and in full snare mods.
‘Barcarolla’ might distantly recall both being boat-rowed and the way Chopin and Fauré tackled such pieces rhythmically. But it looks forward to the way Barcarolles (as with late Fauré and later still Hans Werner Henze in his 1979 orchestral Barcarola) tackled the idea of being somehow rowed over to Hades. It’s certainly unsettled and offers no easy – or happy –  end to a journey. Its rhythms recall the Styx and Ferryman: but heard from the other side.
 ‘Musettes’ (basiakly, bagpipes) has a pictorial resemblance to commedia dell arte but with an almost head-butting insistence and bagpipe drone, recalled in a skirl and wow from the first piece.
‘The Night’s Music’, a pure Bartok night piece, is a relief: staring at stars and hearing insects chirrup, and Li striking single notes. If this is programme music it’s employed to unsettle and project a new world, listened to from another dimension. Trills and apparently stray notes with flashes of dissonance and harmony riffle across the keyboard. One senses Li’s delight here, close to her particular palette like the Mompou and Shostakovich. Even here the movement ends in an ambiguous sequence of repeated notes. A call perhaps, but dissolving as it began. Nightmare or waking delight in dark; it’s hard to say.
Finally ‘Chase’ recalls The Miraculous Mandarin ballet. Less graphically vicious it’s still an exhilarating kind of menace. Full of clashing seconds and chordal dissonances it refuses to let us off with say Prokofiev’s with and banter. Bartok rarely smiles, though he can. If there’s release here it’s the rough bear hug of a passing soldier. Not reassuring. This chase is cheerfully threatening, and a cheer in itself of compositional brio. It’s surprisingly minor keyed and declamatory at the same time in its remorseless logic. Yet at the end it twists away with a shrug. Exhilarating. On this showing Miaoyan Li promises hugely.
