Bruce Liu’s profile has risen rapidly since his victory at the 2021 Chopin International Piano Competition. Now 29, the Canadian pianist has a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon that has extended his reach beyond the concert hall. His latest album, Lunaris, supplied much of the repertoire for his November 1 appearance at Orchestra Hall. Beethoven’s Moonlight and Waldstein sonatas formed the spine of the program, each preceded by a shorter work that offered a fresh perspective on the familiar music.

The approach was particularly effective with the Moonlight Sonata. Its companion was György Ligeti’s Fanfares, from the first book of his études. Built around a repeating figure, the brief piece is a study in controlled disorientation. The melody and accompaniment seem to change places continually between the hands, creating a sense of motion that threatens to spin out of control.

Liu gave the music a manic energy without sacrificing clarity. His articulation made the shifting patterns easy to follow even as the piece seemed to lose its bearings. In his account, Fanfares gradually ran out of steam, its momentum dissolving into a slow retreat toward silence. He allowed the final moments to linger before moving into Beethoven.

One might expect the Moonlight Sonata to offer relief after Ligeti’s radical keyboard language. Instead, the transition sharpened Beethoven by stripping away conventional romantic sentimentality to reveal a starker, more modern edge. The first movement, often treated as an exercise in nocturnal introspection, took on a more unsettled character. Liu used changes in dynamics and keyboard color to bring out the movement’s light and shadow. The familiar music seemed less like a meditation than a landscape in which the light was continually changing.

The connection between the two composers resurfaced in the sonata’s finale. Its driving momentum and emphatic accents recalled the restless energy of Ligeti’s étude. Liu shaped the movement through subtle adjustments of tempo, pushing forward in one passage before pulling back in the next. It was simultaneously a display of virtuosity and an exercise in controlling the music’s underlying tension.

Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata received similar treatment in the second half, with Liu placing Debussy’s Rêverie immediately before it. The pairing suited Liu’s particular strengths, especially his ability to let a melody float above the accompanying texture. Though Debussy’s musical language differs considerably from Ligeti’s, the juxtaposition served a similar purpose. Rêverie drew attention to the delicate, almost weightless character Liu found in the Waldstein’s brief Introduzione, which leads directly into the finale.

There were moments during the recital when Liu’s performance seemed underplayed. His clarity and sensitivity to dynamics were never in question, but his restraint occasionally came at the expense of intensity. That reservation disappeared in the Waldstein finale, where he met the music’s surging energy with boldness and ferocity, revealing the power behind his usually restrained approach.

Beethoven pairings may have been the program’s organizing focus, but the other works were hardly incidental. Liu gave Chopin’s Op. 27 Nocturnes a dreamlike quality, while his performance of Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso underscored the music’s contrasting moods. Both were persuasive, though their placement between Beethoven’s sonatas made them seem almost like interludes.

After the Waldstein, Mompou’s Glossa sobre Au clair de la lune and Albéniz’s El puerto from Iberia offered more compact worlds before the expansive finale of Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole. Liu brought a keen ear for texture to both, drawing out their distinct atmospheres without overstating their effects.

He dispatched Liszt’s formidable technical demands with ease, but was most compelling between its outbursts. His shading and attention to changes in texture gave the quieter passages an unexpected intimacy. Several drew audible gasps from the audience.

When the Liszt ended, Orchestra Hall erupted in applause. Few in the audience could have anticipated that Liu had another 20 minutes of music in reserve. Six encores followed, ranging from études by Chopin and Philip Glass to a ragtime arrangement of Beethoven’s Für Elise and Schubert’s Moment Musicaux in F minor, Op. 94, No. 3.

The six encores capped an already substantial recital. Liu’s restraint occasionally held the music at arm’s length, but framing Beethoven alongside Ligeti and Debussy gave the familiar sonatas edge and revealed unexpected connections. That sense of discovery, more than the bravura or the marathon encores, made the afternoon memorable.

Originally published on Third Coast Review

---