“After his win at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021,” said Carnegie Hall publicity, “Bruce Liu’s ascendance to superstardom has been swift. Incredibly, tonight’s performance is already his third Carnegie Hall recital . . .”
That recital took place on Friday night. Mr. Liu is a Canadian, born in Paris to Chinese parents. He is twenty-eight.
At Carnegie Hall, he played a very interesting and diverse program. It began with Ligeti and ended with Liszt. (Who needs chronology?)
The Ligeti was his Étude No. 4, “Fanfares,” from 1985. It was light and limpid, and flavored with jazz. The Liszt was the Rhapsodie espagnole, from 1858. It is jaw-droppingly difficult. And Mr. Liu played it with jaw-dropping ability. He had the musical imagination to match the flying fingers.
I think Liszt himself would immediately have stood and applauded—as I did.
When basic skills have been mastered, musical performance comes down to taste, really. Judgment.
After his opening Ligeti, Liu turned to a Bach suite—the French Suite No. 5 in G major. People tend to know the sarabande from this suite. It is one of Bach’s most beautiful and shapely “arias.”
Maybe I could quote something I wrote last season, when reviewing a recital by Evgeny Kissin, the Soviet-born pianist (which also took place in Carnegie Hall):
He began with Bach: the Partita in C minor. I thought of Wanda Landowska—who said, “You can play Bach your way, I’ll play him his way.” She made this remark in a friendly spirit to Pablo Casals. But it has come down to us as a censorious proclamation.
There is more than one way to skin the cat of Bach. I am happy to listen to Landowska and Casals. And to Samuil Feinberg and Glenn Gould and many others. The chief question, it seems to me, is not musicological but this: Is it musical, the person’s playing?
In his French suite, Mr. Liu made choices that you or I might not have made. His playing was rather small. It also tended to be on the surface of the keys. When it came to legato versus detached, this pianist erred on the side of detached. Ornamentation was ample and liberal—perhaps excessive.
Some of the playing was downright eccentric, I’m afraid. Did Liu really begin the gavotte slowly and then accelerate?
After Bach came Beethoven—a sonata, and a nicknamed one: the “Waldstein,” which is to say, the Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53. As Mr. Liu played, I thought of the word “gravitas”—maybe an overused word, in various contexts, but a useful one. I wanted more gravitas, more sturdiness, more definition, more incisiveness, more intensity. More Beethoven, I’m tempted to say.
But did Bruce Liu play a creditable “Waldstein”? Of course.
The second half of the program began with the two nocturnes that make up Chopin’s Op. 27. The first is in C-sharp minor and the second in D-flat major. But there is a sense in which they’re in the same key: because the C-sharp minor ends in C-sharp major, which is, after all, D flat.
You might expect me to have complaints, or disagreements, and I do. I wanted the pianist to sing out more. I think some of the rubato, or license with time, was ill-advised. There were hesitations and pauses that made me grind my teeth a bit.
The program ended with Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole, as you know. Beforehand, there were other Spanish, or Spanish-inflected, pieces: by Ravel, Albéniz, and Mompou.
How good to hear Mompou, by the way! We have not heard him much since Alicia de Larrocha, the great Spanish pianist (1923–2009), left the scene. But we have heard him, and other Spanish music, from Arcadi Volodos, the Soviet-born pianist, who has long lived in Spain.
And now we have heard him from Bruce Liu. I hope that pianists, wherever they’re from and wherever they live, keep the Spanish repertoire—one of our most flavorful and pleasurable—alive.
I thought of something when Liu played “El Puerto,” which comes from Book I of Albéniz’s Iberia. When writing about de Larrocha in such music, I would often resort to language that advertises breakfast cereal: “snap, crackle, and pop.” She had those qualities in spades, and so does the music.
For generations, pianists have played the Bach-Siloti Prelude in B minor, particularly as an encore. Bruce Liu did this in Carnegie Hall. And he played it with beauty and intelligence. The piece had its sublimity.
He’s just getting started, this guy. Liu may be playing recitals at Carnegie Hall in the 2070s and ’80s . . .
