Benito li Vigni

Debut album for Ying Li, winner of the first edition of the Antonio Mormone International Prize in 2021 after having also established herself at the Young Concert Artist Auditions in New York and at the Concours Musical International de Montréal as a finalist.

Born in Chongqing 19 years before he made this Chopin recording, Yundi Li is too old to qualify as a prodigy, and he's absurdly young to be labelled a "great master", but that's indubitably what he is. He has all the poetry and authority of Evgeny Kissin, but no whiff of that Russian's aggressive self-projection. When he won the Warsaw Competition at 18, he announced that he wanted to become "the next Zimerman", but the real Zimerman turned down his request to study with him, saying there was nothing more he could teach him. This CD demonstrates the point to perfection: the only flaw one might detect–over-pedalling in a Nocturne–proves to be a carefully calculated effect in one of a series of gorgeously fresh renderings of hackneyed favourites. Li opens with the third sonata, establishing a big golden tone from the outset; he points up the architecture of this episodic work with leisurely assurance, and if his tempi seem leisurely even in the fast movements, that is because he brings out every detail with pellucid clarity. How did such quintessentially romantic playing emerge from the heart of China? Don't even ask: just marvel, and enjoy.

Australian-Chinese wunderkind, Christian Li, became the youngest ever First Prize winner at the Menuhin Competition in 2018. Now, he becomes the youngest ever artist to record Vivaldi's The Four Seasons as he presents his debut album at the age of 13, play-directing a chamber ensemble from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The album also includes a traditional folk tune inspired by the fishermen's harvest in the South China Sea and adapted by contemporary Chinese composer Li Zili.

Steinway artist Zhenni Li-Cohen's latest album gives the world an opportunity to discover the piano works of Ukrainian composer Sergei Bortkiewicz. Li-Cohen says that through Bortkiewicz’s music she has found yearning, nostalgia, and the ineffable, expressing the whole spectrum of emotion that makes us human; tears, joy, sweeping love, passion, and humor.