Zhenni Li’s new Steinway release is a bolt from the blue. Li holds bachelor and master’s degrees from Juilliard, where she worked with Seymour Lipkin and Joseph Kalichstein. She continued postgraduate studies with Peter Frankl at Yale and with Stéphane Lemelin at McGill. Her beautiful sound is captured in full dimension and depth in this expertly engineered recording.

Li leaves no detail of Schumann’s F sharp minor Sonata unattended. The minute scrutiny brought to every element of the score would, in other hands, fragment and shatter the piece. Yet somehow, by dint of passionate identification and sheer force of will, Li pulls it off. Her extravagant and pervasive rubato, which occasionally risks derailing everything she sets in motion, strikes nonetheless as so heartfelt and intrinsic to her emotional response to the music as to be indisputable. There are moments when you wish for more than just a few consecutive measures of steady pulse, but then Li’s torrents of voluptuous sound sweep away any reservation. I am unprepared to venture how this interpretative approach might fare when applied to any other Romantic sonata, but the mercurial landscape of Schumann’s Op 11 is able to encompass it, and Li emerges, if not triumphant, at least thoroughly persuasive.

Translating the titles of Bartók’s Op 8b as either the Latinate ‘elegy’ or the Middle English-derived ‘dirge’ is misleading. The original Hungarian sírato is something closer to ‘keening at graveside’. In any case, Bartók’s precise notation of these folk-inspired works seems the antithesis of the fulsome Scriabinesque melange of Li’s conception. Arthur Lourié’s 1910 Preludes, on the other hand, strike just the right note of elusive piquancy.

Li impresses as an artist of tremendous conviction, who fascinates even as she provokes. Time will tell.