Pianist George Li was still a teenager when he won the silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 2015, and that was five years after he’d won first prize at the 2010 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. Li has also won the 2012 Gilmore Young Artist Award and a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 2011 he was invited to play at a state dinner at The White House.
Li got an early start to his career, to be sure: Having begun piano lessons at the age of 4, he gave his first public performance—at Steinway Hall, in his hometown of Boston—at the age of 10. Li remained in the Boston area while pursuing his education, and in 2019 he completed a dual-degree program at Harvard and the New England Conservatory. In addition to earning a master’s in music and an artist diploma, Li earned a bachelor’s in English literature, which, in an interview with the Mondavi Center at UC Davis, he said “was really helpful” for him. “I think over the four years I came to realize how important literature is and how interconnected it is with music,” he added. “I realized . . . how much I grew while studying literature and learning how to write and express my feelings through words and how much that helped me communicate music with people.”
Li has been communicating music with people for more than two decades, and The New York Times has hailed his “bracing” and “fearless” style, which it described as combining “youthful abandon with utter command.” The Washington Post praised Li’s “staggering technical prowess” and “depth of expression,” and the Chicago Tribune called Li’s playing “extraordinary.”
As one of today’s most in-demand pianists, Li has given recitals at the world’s leading venues—from New York’s Carnegie Hall and Chicago’s Symphony Center to Paris’s Louvre Museum, Munich’s Gasteig, and Tokyo’s Musashino Hall. He appears at the world’s leading festivals, including ones in Verbier, Edinburgh, Aix-en-Provence, and here in Santa Fe, where he made his Festival debut in 2024. He’s also appeared with the London, Los Angeles, and New York philharmonic orchestras; the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras; the Dallas, Frankfurt Radio, and San Francisco symphony orchestras; the Orchestra National de Lyon; and many other renowned ensembles. Li is an exclusive Warner Classics recording artist, and so far he’s released three critically acclaimed albums.
This summer, Li makes his highly anticipated return to the Festival by appearing on three wide-ranging programs, beginning with the season-opening concerts on July 19 & 20, when he joins violinist Danbi Um and New York Philharmonic Principal Cellist Carter Brey for Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50. The following day, on July 21, he gives a recital that features two defining works of the solo-piano repertoire: Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a powerful evocation of a memorial for Mussorgsky’s friend that was held at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Arts, and the first book of Debussy’s two-book suite Images. On July 22, Li makes his last appearance of the season when he joins forces with flutist Tara Helen O’Connor and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Principal Percussionist Gregory Zuber for Bernstein’s Halil, which the composer said speaks to a sense of war-based or war-feared “struggle” and to “the consolations of art, love, and the hope for peace.”