Champion Pianist Bruce Liu Performs at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 24 May 2023 13:41

Written by Jack Angstreich

Bruce Liu at the piano. Photo by Jennifer Taylor.

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Friday, May 19th, I had the pleasure of attending the memorable New York recital debut of pianist Bruce Liu, the winner of the 2021 International Chopin Piano Competition.

The program began charmingly and promisingly with an admirable account of Frédéric Chopin’s sparkling Rondo à la mazur in F Major, Op. 5, one of the composer’s earliest works—written when he was just sixteen—but one not without Romantic depths. Robert Schumann praised it, saying that “whoever does not yet know Chopin would be well advised to begin with this piece.”

A more histrionic strand of Chopin was then presented with an accomplished rendition of one of his ballades—it was the No. 2 in F Major, Op. 38—a genre that the composer invented. The first half of the program concluded impressively with the at times dazzling Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, written when Chopin was only seventeen. (The composer was one of Chopin’s favorites, along with Johann Sebastian Bach and Vincenzo Bellini.) Schumann’s review of the piece included the line: “Hats off, gentlemen—a genius.”

The second part of the recital was even more remarkable beginning with a beautiful realization of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 35—indeed the famous Funeral March movement was one of the highlights of the evening. Schumann’s description of the work is worth quoting: “That he should have called it a ‘sonata’ suggests a joke, if not sheer bravado. He seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them together, possibly thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company where they might not be considered individually presentable.”

Also notable was an exquisite version of the Trois nouvelles etudes, Op. Posthumous. The program proper ended with an astonishing performance of Franz Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan. In 1841, the composer told Marie d’Agoult that he was “working like a madman at some tremendous fantasies. Norma, La sonnambula, Freischütz, Maometto, Moïse, and Don Juan will be ready in five or six days. It is a new vein I have found and want to exploit. The effect these latest productions make is vastly superior to my previous things.” The audience’s response to Liu’s playing was incredibly enthusiastic, eliciting an amazing seven encores!: Jean-Philippe Rameau’s marvelous "Les tendres plaintes" from Suite in D Major from Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin; Chopin’s Écossaise in D-flat Major from Three Écossaises, Op. posth. 72, No. 3; Erik Satie’s superb Gnossienne No. 1; Liszt’s excellent "La campanella" in G-sharp Major fromGrandes Études de Paganini;Isaac Albéniz’s "El Puerto" fromIberia,Book I; Chopin’s Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 10, No. 5, "Black Keys"; and Nikolai Kapustin’s jazzy Variations for Piano, Op. 41.

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