Pianist
Kate Liu made her much anticipated recital debut yesterday. In case you
haven’t heard, she was the bronze-medal winner of the 2015
International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, as well as the Polish Radio
prize for best performance of a mazurka. Those who came expecting an
avalanche of Chopin may have been disappointed at the programme, but it
has been almost four years since the Chopin competition, and we should
not be surprised that any artist would want to expand her repertoire.
She had certainly not chosen a programme for the faint-hearted, but one
that challenged every aspect of her musical and pianistic abilities.
Liu began her performance with Brahms’ Ballades,
Op. 10. These are unusual for Brahms’ early music because unlike the
sonatas or variations, these are not virtuosic works by any means, but
almost foreshadow those wonderful late opuses that Brahms was to write
at the end of his life. Liu played these pieces almost like a series of
ruminations, looking very much inwardly at the music. To be sure, there
was drama when drama was called for, such as in the shattering climax of
the Ballade in D minor, Op. 10, No. 1. At the return of the A
section, Liu played the left hand triplets that conjured the disquieting
nature of the original ballad, evoking in my mind an impression of one
injured.
I was very taken with the beauty of her sound, and how she voiced the octaves and chords at the beginning of the Ballade in D major, Op. 10, No. 2. There may be those who wish for greater drama in the Allegro non troppo section, but an examination of the score reveals that Brahms only wrote a single, very brief fortissimo indication. Even in the relatively stormier Ballade in B minor, Op. 10, No. 3, the dynamic indications range from pianississimo (ppp) to forte only, with many more indications in the softer dynamic ranges. In the beautiful Ballade in B major, Op. 10, No. 4, with the descending figures in the opening foreshadowing the late Intermezzo in B minor, Op, 119, No. 1, Liu really achieved a sense of repose. In the Piu Lento section,
there was real depth of sound, and a feeling of absolute stillness. She
certainly paid much more than lip service to Brahms’ indication of Col intimissimo sentimento.
These are perhaps very personal interpretations to these early Brahms
works. That said, Liu was doing no more than working (hard) to bring out
what the composer asks for, a really remarkable achievement for someone
so young.
Of
all of Chopin’s works, I believe that the mazurkas invite the greatest
range of interpretative views. The inevitable question is whether the
artist penetrated the composer’s soul with these, Chopin’s most personal
and original works. The answer here was and is a resounding yes. Kate
Liu painted Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor, Op. 59, No. 1, on a
large canvas. She played this large-scale miniature in a spacious
manner, and lavished her attention to the many pauses and spaces within
the music. At times, it almost sounded as if she was improvising. Her
playing of the Mazurka in A-flat, Op. 59, No. 2, brought out the
elegance of this music, and her phrasing here was truly magical. She
brought us back to the world of the Polish countryside with her
idiomatic performance of the Mazurka in F-sharp minor, Op. 59, No. 3. I also liked her slightly wistful approach to the F-sharp major section.
Two
short works concluded the first half of Liu’s recital. Liu is not a
pianist with a big sound. That said, her playing of Rachmaninoff’s Etude-tableaux in E-flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5 and Liszt’s Transcendental Etude No. 10 in F minor(“Appassionata”)
revealed the richness of the sound she evoked from the piano, a sound
that is never ugly or percussive. Certainly these works, which most
pianists would use as a mere vehicle to demonstrate his or her technical
abilities, made me feel that she had thought through these works
carefully. In the Liszt especially, there was an easy elegance that I
found appealing. It is interesting that it was in these relatively
virtuosic works that showed her to be very much a thinking musician.
The second half of the recital was taken up with one very large-scale work – Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 8,
the last of the three so-called “war sonatas”. Liu successfully
navigated through the bleak soundscape of the first movement, giving it a
sense of coherence and totality. The second movement (Andante sognando)
once again highlighted the beauty of her sound as well as the lyricism
of her playing. Liu more than rose to the technical challenges laid down
by the composer in the third movement, and her blistering, almost
orchestral, playing of the third movement left the piano limp and the
audience breathless. We would of course forgive her for not wanting to
play any encore after such a performance.
Sunday’s
recital confirmed my view that Kate Liu is not “just” another
fire-breathing virtuoso with steel fingers, but a musician and artist
with a carefully considered view to whatever she is playing. She is of
course only at the outset of her artistic journey. For now, I only hope
that she is “done” with the competition circuit, because I believe that
what she needs is to strike out on her own path and find her place
within the artistic firmament.
