Bruce Liu - Tchaikovsky: The Seasons

Bruce Liu — Tchaikovsky: The Seasons

Second studio album from pianist Bruce Liu

Deutsche Grammophon is delighted to announce the release of the second studio album from Bruce Liu. Following the huge success of Waves, the exploration of French keyboard music that recently earned the pianist a "Young Talent of the Year" Opus Klassik award and has helped him achieve streaming figures of more than 70 million in the last three years, Liu has chosen to focus on the intimate and expressive solo piano music of Tchaikovsky.

Earlier this year, at the Siemens-Villa in Berlin, he recorded The Seasons, a set of 12 character pieces.

Liu shot to fame in 2021 when he won the International Chopin Competition. Since then, his life has been a whirlwind of touring, media appearances and the occasional chance to mix music with his other great passion, sport — notably with his recent recording of the orchestral version of "Fire," the official Euro 2024 song, produced by Italian trio Meduza. Having spent little time at home, or even on his own, he was particularly attracted to the Tchaikovsky solo piano repertoire, not only because of its richly poetic idiom, but also because he found the process of learning the pieces on this album helped him find moments of calm and took him into a new musical world.

As Liu notes, while The Seasons is Tchaikovsky's most famous solo piano work, it was in fact aimed at amateur pianists: the 12 pieces were commissioned by the Russian music journal Nuvellist and printed one at a time in monthly issues throughout the year 1876, prefaced with lines from a pertinent poem. Given their origin, the challenge of playing these pieces lies not in their technical difficulty, but in bringing out their deeper meaning. "Because there are comparatively few notes, you have to care about every one of them," explains Liu. "Each note must really speak."

"What's so special about the work," he adds, "is that it's so intimate, as if Tchaikovsky were speaking to himself when he wrote the pieces. It combines the folk element that inspired his ballets with the brilliance and flamboyance found in his concertos. More than that, it has a thoughtfulness and calmness at its core."

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