Canadian pianist Bruce Liu is certainly charting an interesting course, repertoire wise, through the series of generally excellent albums he has produced with Deutsche Grammophon over the past five years. The only predictable move was his debut release: “Winner of the 18th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition Warsaw 2021 (Live)”.
That’s his final round competition performance from Warsaw, Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor, Op. 11, in October 2021. His debut album celebrating the win was a well-chosen selection of solo Chopin repertoire drawn from the earlier rounds, rushed out immediately after Liu’s victory in November. The Fryderyk Chopin Institute put out another batch of his competition performances in early 2022 (via Sony). And then Liu signed as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist in March of that year.
His first under the new arrangement was a rather predictable “taster” EP (digital release only) in 2023, just 12 minutes, devoted to Bach’s French Suite No. 5. This was nice and all, but the main event of 2023 was still in preparation. For our taste of Liu’s Bach today, I’d rather go with this:
This “Bach” is a romantic transcription by Siloti of a prelude from the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues (BWV 553–560), which are now generally accepted as the work of Johann Krebs, not Johann S. Bach. But it’s Bach-adjacent nonetheless, and the point about this performance is that it plays up Liu’s greatest strengths: a fabulous ability to pull kaleidoscopic color from his instrument, and a striking way of shaping inner voices and even hidden voices within the music. The video is actually his encore from a concerto performance in 2024 at the Rheingau Music Festival, and you can already hear how far Bruce Liu has come since his competition victory in 2021.
But I mentioned the main event of 2023 was yet to come…
Bruce Liu’s actual full length album debut on DG was WAVES: Music by Rameau, Ravel, Alkan, releasted in November 2023. And right away, we see that he is not going to be making conventional repertoire choices as a recording artist. The obvious connection is three French composers across different eras, but it’s an unconventional trio. There’s more to the choices than French lineage: all of these pieces are concerned with pictorial suggestion, vivid characterization, narrative… and yes, scope for kaleidoscopic color that gives Liu room to work. The live performance in the video above doesn’t give you the full picture, the album itself is a must-listen.
Another WAVES release followed in 2024, another French composer in the spotlight, this time Erik Satie. And that’s where I’ll leave the story for now. Stay tuned for Lunaris on Friday!
