Your far-flung correspondent reports from Frank Gehry’s magnificent Walt Disney Concert Hall, where Boston’s own George Li gave us a thrillingly fresh reading of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic dexterously conducted by Xian Zhang. The program opened with Emerge by Pulitzer Prize winning composer Michael Abels. The 10-minute work, depicting musicians tuning up and then recovering their collective groove, emerging from the isolation of the pandemic, ebbed and flowed delightfully under Zhang’s superbly controlled baton. Using notes and instrumental timbres “as though mixing colors” (as Abels characterized it in a pre-concert interview with UCLA’s musicologist Michael Dean) Emerge led us on an emotional trip through loneliness, woundedness, and anxiety to a place of renewed vitality and gritty solidarity. Remembering how to work together, the orchestral sections began slightly out of step, withdrew, then reunited with powerful tutti sheets of sound, celebrating diversity as a source of joy, culminating in an uplifting note of hope.

How does one make such a well-known warhorse as Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 surprising and fresh? Georges Li’s secret, as he told us in the pre-concert interview, lies in returning to the score for a close reading, to discern anew the composer’s intent and to be attentive to finding hidden gems. From the start, Li delivered a distinctly complex, crisp, forceful, dramatic, yet subtle, lyrical and coherent interpretation, even as Zhang skillfully guided the orchestra to yield and give the piano its full scope. Li’s exegetical finesse gave a line of continuity to the long first movement, which often feels episodic, imbuing it with a deep inner logic in its scenic range. Overall, the three movements worked organically to bring us face to face with the towering power of human desire, the temptation to live with it unfulfilled in the second movement, which Zhang and Li took more “andante” than “andantino”. The wistfulness and longing of the A section flowed cleanly to the light, airy and dance-like prestissimo trio. The final third movement then erupted with a desire unleashed because sublimated – leading us to discover that art fulfills inexhaustibly through joy, dance and inebriation. Played with fire, as directed, Li and the LA Phil under Zhang’s vigilant guidance worked splendidly together, reinforcing each other in an exuberant rush. Fittingly, Li chose the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata for his well-earned encore, showing us how longing is timelessly transubstantiated into absolute beauty by the great master.

Music celebrates sublimation, but also affords a venue for insightful analysis. The second half brought us the revived and reconstructed three-movement fantasy for orchestra The Mermaid by Alexander von Zemlinsky. Composed as a way to grapple with his unhappy love for Alma Schindler after she abandoned him for Gustav Mahler, Zemlinsky appropriated Anderson’s fairy tale to lead us through a journey of felicitous shipwreck (1^st Movement), magic love “at the bottom of the sea” where ego-boundaries dissolve and “two become one” (2^nd movement), then to a painful, protracted and inevitable return to sobriety (3^rd movement). Inventive orchestration, for instance bringing in successive waves of strings, winds and brass, provided a dreamy atmosphere in the opening movement. Powerful crescendos, carefully controlled dynamics and sectional balance by Zhang built the drama of the shipwreck. Shimmering strings, swelling to a light and brilliant dance, combined with undulations in the clarinets and techniques drawn from Berlioz and Strauss in evoking an enchanted, submerged ballroom. The glamour yielded to layers of sadness in the strings reinforced by the brass, as the scene dissolved into an image of the sad, isolated mermaid forced to give up her dream.

The third movement, depicting the mermaid’s renunciation of the Prince, moved from a lonely alto saxophone into a series of sweeping crescendos ― perhaps too many of them as they lost their effectiveness through repeated use. Zemlinsky could have benefitted from some editing, as the third movement came across as bloatedly Wagnerian, but without the supporting stagecraft to carry the score. After a fade to silence, however, the musical journey built to a sweeping climax. Individuality is restored in agony, bringing the aquatic magical soul from vanity and seduction into an airy being, uplifted into a higher artistic eloquence and embedded in the vastness of Time.

Leon Golub is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and has been a lover of classical music for over 50 years.