The concerts of the Artist Residency Series are the culmination of the participation of tomorrow’s music stars- young and brilliant pianists who come to the festival to work with the artist faculty of Porto Pianofest and prepare for tours, recordings, important concerts, and to make their art known to the world.

Pianists are chosen, from all continents, to perform in a solo recital and share their unique musical ideas with our welcoming audience in Porto.

On August 5th at 13h00 at Casa Comum- Universidade do Porto, young Canadian star Sirui Li returns to Porto to perform a beautiful program with music by Handel, Mozart, Chopin, Scriabin, and Hindemith. 

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Program Notes from the Artist:

With this program, I'd like to take you on a walk through music history, and share with you some of the most unique and stunning gems along the way. We begin in the Baroque era with Handel's Chaconne in G Major, a beautiful set of variations. While it may not be as heavyweight as, say, Bach's Goldberg variations, it nonetheless contains plenty of touching moments of great depth. With its wealth of character and charm, it serves perfectly as a delightful appetizer for what's to come. Moving into the Classical era, I present one of the perhaps most deeply personal works ever written by Mozart - his Sonata in A minor, K. 310. Composed in a painful period of grief following the death of his mother, this piece is certainly startlingly different from most of his piano works. The turmoil, anguish, anxiousness, and poignant fragments of loving memories are all still immediately palpable even after two and a half centuries. Chopin's Ballade No. 3 marks our entry into the Romantic era. This piece has been speculated to be inspired by Adam Mickiewicz’s poem "Świtezianka" (also known as "Undine"), which tells the tale of a water nymph who falls in love with a mortal man, then punishes him for his unfaithfulness. While there is no definitive evidence linking the piece to this story, the Ballade nonetheless possesses a quality of epic narration from its opening bars. As we reach the end of the Romantic era and transition into early modernism, Scriabin's Vers la Flamme presents us with a deliciously delirious sound world that is almost feverish and otherworldly. The piece unfolds like a kaleidoscope of flickering, ever-shifting colors. As it progresses, the music is eventually driven to ecstatic heights of intensity. In the end, as if finally consumed by the flames, it bursts into one last beam of light before fading into nothingness. The program concludes with what I personally believe to be one of the modern masterpieces of contrapuntal writing, the fugal final movement of Hindemith's Sonata No. 3. It perhaps rivals the great Beethoven's fugal writing in dramatic narrative or maybe even approaches Bach, to a certain extent. Although its harmonic language is decidedly modern, it remains accessible; this energetic piece maintains clear tonal "centers" and has a strong sense of relative tension and release in its harmonic progression.