This post is Part 3 of my Piano Pedagogy Spotlight interview series with Chinese concert pianist and piano professor Chenyin Li. In this article, we discuss Chenyin’s performing career.

Tell us about your current performing activities. Do you play mostly solo recitals or concerti? Do you have a preference?

At the moment I perform mostly solo recitals, although I expect concerto performances will feature more in the near future as I am receiving increasing invitations from orchestras in China. I feel that recitals allow the audience to experience my playing in a different depth: through programming I can present a varied palette, carefully threaded together like a narrative.

For next season I am planning a series of recitals built around the complete Chopin Ballades, paired with other works that share a strong storytelling quality. The idea is to form a wider theme of “narrative music,” something I find both inspiring and rewarding to explore in performance.

I wouldn’t say I have a strong preference between recital and concerto playing, because each reveals a different facet of music-making. The recital is an intimate dialogue with the audience, while the concerto is a collaboration — a wonderful opportunity for a pianist, who so often works alone, to communicate and create together with fellow musicians.

Do you play chamber music? Which repertoire have you explored so far?

I used to have a piano trio called the East-Western Piano Trio, together with the brilliant violinist Anya Birchall and cellist Chris Wright. We explored much of the essential trio repertoire and received very encouraging feedback from our concerts. Sadly, after a few years our cellist suffered a hand injury, which brought the group to an end.

That experience made me recognise the practical challenges of maintaining a permanent chamber group today. Every member’s personal background, home environment, and career trajectory play such a big role, and they can make it difficult for a group to last long-term. Even many brilliant ensembles eventually come to a natural close after a certain phase, and I think that is one of the realities of chamber music.

Since then, I have preferred to collaborate with different musicians on a project basis. This more flexible approach allows us to work together intensively for a particular concert or programme, without the long-term pressures of sustaining a permanent group. For me, it feels like a more pragmatic way to keep chamber music alive, while still enjoying the richness and inspiration of making music with others.

You have an upcoming project featuring Chopin’s Four Ballades. How did this come to fruition? Tell us more about the project?

This project grew quite naturally out of my new role as a Visiting Professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. UCAS is one of China’s leading universities for science, and they have invited a remarkable group of specialists from around the world to give lectures to their students, even though most of them are not studying music as their main subject.

This made me think carefully about how I could combine my university lectures with my ongoing performance projects, so that they could reinforce one another. The idea of presenting Chopin’s Four Ballades seemed ideal: they are among the most representative and powerful works of the Romantic era, and they have a narrative and expressive character that speaks across disciplines, not only to musicians.

In the past I had already studied three of the Ballades, though those were much earlier attempts when I was younger. Returning to them now, and completing the cycle, has given me the chance to reconstruct my ideas, refine my interpretation, and approach them with a more mature perspective. Surprisingly — but in a wonderful way — this process has also rekindled my passion for Chopin’s music, which I had not been so involved with in recent years.

Tell us about your various past and present recording projects?

Interestingly, I have never really set out to plan major recording projects myself — most of them have come about through invitations. For example, I recorded a Debussy disc for the ‘Homage to Debussy’ project with Genuin Classics, as part of my role as a Blüthner artist. I also released a DVD from the Auckland International Piano Festival, where I was invited as the resident artist, performing as well as giving masterclasses.

I have also been fortunate to collaborate repeatedly with the Grammy-nominated composer Rhian Samuel. I recorded her ‘Gallant for Anne’ for the ‘Light and Water’ CD, and later gave a live broadcast performance of her ‘Isolation Suite’, which she composed during the COVID period. More recently, I was honoured to be invited by David Wallace to record his upcoming 2026 release, ‘Cliff Edge’. I perform the main title work on the disc, and I am also looking forward to programming his music in several of my concerts next season.

At the same time, I am continuously involved in recording through my regular work for Pianist magazine, where I produce six CDs each year. This has become an integral part of my life as a pianist, and although it is quite different from preparing a single composer album, it provides a steady opportunity to engage with a wide range of repertoire — both well-known and less familiar — and to share it with a large audience. After recording more than 80 CDs for Pianist I have also gained a great amount of experience in the studio.

What are your favourite performance venues?

This is a difficult question, because so much of how one feels about a hall is tied to the success of the performance itself — and that does not always depend on the venue alone. For me, I feel most at ease in spaces where there is a sense of intimacy with the audience. If the seating is arranged in such a way that I can feel a close connection with listeners, it immediately enhances the sense of communication.

Acoustics are another important factor. I always appreciate a hall with a resonant but not overly reverberant sound, where the tone remains clear. Of course, acoustics often improve as the audience fills the space, and that in itself can be energising.

One venue that stands out in my memory is the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. I remember feeling a great warmth and positivity from the audience there, and the hall’s acoustic and instrument combined to create an environment that was both inspiring and supportive. It left me with a particularly vivid and happy memory of performing.

Which performances do you consider your most important? And those which have been most exciting?

There are quite a few performances that stand out in my memory, but perhaps the most significant belong to the big concert hall occasions, where the venue, conductor, and orchestra are influential figures and the impact of the performance is correspondingly greater. I remember the exhilaration of winning the Scottish International Piano Competition and performing Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Alexander Lazarev. Another highlight was in 2013, when I was invited to play Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing with the China Symphony Orchestra conducted by En Shao. Both were unforgettable experiences.

But perhaps the most memorable performance of all came in the most unexpected place: the far northern town of Inverness, where I gave a recital for the local music club. The piano was an old Bechstein, but during Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, Op. 53, the performance built up to such an exhilarating atmosphere that I felt the entire audience — and I myself — were holding our breath until the final triumphant coda. Then, as if on cue, during the interval the piano’s front leg actually broke. It became a wonderful anecdote, but also a reminder that sometimes the most magical performances happen in the most unlikely places.

As already mentioned, you are Pianist Magazine’s resident pianist which requires you to record a complete CD of piano music, published in every edition. What has been the most fascinating part of this role and what are the challenges?

This role came to me in 2011, when the English edition of Pianist magazine detached from its sister publication in France and moved on to publish their own selection of scores and recordings. At the time, everything about the project was new, and I became an integral part of the team as the magazine began to take shape and grow. What started as the role of a pianist simply delivering high-quality recordings of the assigned pieces gradually expanded into something much larger.

I must also pay special credit to my good friend, the brilliant pianist Lucy Parham, who first introduced me to this work. At the beginning I was not confident about taking it on, but thanks to her encouragement — and that introduction — it has become one of the most important and enduring parts of my career. For that I will always feel indebted to her.

Over the years I became more involved in planning and consultation with the editor, Erica Worth — who has become not only a wonderful colleague but also a friend. Together we have discussed themes for the magazine, explored lesser-known repertoire, including music by female composers, and connected the magazine with the wider piano world through the contacts I had built over time.

Now, almost fifteen years later, I have recorded for nearly ninety issues of the magazine — with the same number of CDs released alongside them. This body of work has been an extraordinary journey, exposing me to an enormous range of repertoire, particularly miniature pieces, which I had not explored so much in my earlier years when I tended to focus on larger works. Learning to treat these small pieces almost like looking through a musical microscope — quickly but deeply finding their essence and making them meaningful — has been both a challenge and a joy.

More recently I have also begun writing for the magazine, including a case study column on Chopin’s Ballade No. 2, for which I recorded an accompanying video. Writing in English has never come easily to me, and as a non-native speaker I have often felt a certain lack of confidence about expressing myself in words rather than in music. But, as with everything else, I have decided to simply start somewhere, to do my best, and to trust that over time I will grow more comfortable in this form of expression.

www.chenyinli.com