Bruce Liu came to perform Wednesday evening in his city, for the first time since his victory at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw a year and a half ago, the 2e Concerto of Chopin. The whole planet will probably have heard it before us, but it was worth the wait.
Mezzo’s cameras were there to capture the event and broadcast it live. Silence was requested and generally well followed, apart from a few individuals who always think they are smart to cough on the last pianissimo chord of a symphony or to carry their “Tic Tac” sweets in their container in order to preserve the freshness of their breath during the subtle scintillations of the music of Goubaïdoulina.
Fortunately, the fact of the evening remains musical, with this very fine 2e Concerto by Chopin, approached with a lot of energy by the Ukrainian-Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska, an orchestral speech on which Bruce Liu landed with a piano playing of great clarity and freedom, nourished by creative countermelodies.
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Bruce Liu’s Chopin is poetic, but not forced. Sometimes he lingers, or rather dawdles a little, on a nook of a sentence, but the better to relaunch the discourse — he never falls into Chopin’s rose water. The slow movement keeps this light, graceful, liquid aspect. If we wanted to compare Charles Richard-Hamelin and Bruce Liu in this repertoire, we would say that in an evening the first, elegant, distinguished, refined, would keep his bow tie, while the second would take off his jacket and open his collar.
Liu does not do this in a demonstrative way, however. In the months following the 1980 Chopin Competition, Ivo Pogorelich had played the 2e Concerto and he literally “exploded” the 3rd movement in a firework of very campy rhythms. Bruce Liu is dancing, but without boasting, in a sparkling cocktail that does not seek to be rogue. As an encore, Bruce Liu played The Savages de Rameau, a composer he plays frequently these days.
The first part was very robust, with a big work by Sofia Goubaïdoulina from 2003 and the 6e by Sibelius. Dalia Stasevska has taken from the work of the Finnish composer the best that a guest conductor can take from an orchestra that does not have this work in its DNA. Sibelius’ Sixth is particularly complex and it’s almost a “yo-yo” in terms of dynamic hairpins. We simplify our work by limiting the aspect or the extent of these contrasts, which on the contrary we dig if an orchestra is accustomed to Sibelius or to the score. This was especially valid in the 1er movement, Wednesday. But the listeners still got a fair picture of the composition.
As for Goubaïdoulina, she once again demonstrates her science and inventiveness of orchestration in The Light of the End, which exposes the tensions between what should be and what is, a concept leading to conflicts between man and nature, through oppositions between agreements and disagreements in the orchestra. The end, scintillating, is particularly striking, just like an episode with tuba.