Bruce Liu: Waves (Deutsche Grammophon)

★★★☆☆

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The content of this DG debut album by the 2021 Chopin Competitition winner is arrestingly original. It features three French composers from the last three centuries — the court opera composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), the Jewish misanthrope Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-88), and the Basque bachelor Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) — never knowingly conjoined in the same programme.

Despite a common mother tongue, the three masters speak different musical languages. Rameau writes with baroque playfulness for the harpsichord. Alkan strives to be more unplayable than Liszt. Ravel inhabits an oceanic loneliness, somewhere between impressionism and modernism. The combination, on paper, looks wildly exciting.

In performance,it is less so. Rameau on a modern concert grand (Fazioli?) is not the real Rameau but a hybrid harpsi-morbidity, resdesigned for movie scenes. His celebrated Gavotte loses its lovely courtliness, and Les Sauvages is far from aboriginal.

The two Alkan pieces here are the relatively unchallenging Barcarolle and Festin d’Esope, both made to sound Chopinesque rather than window-shattering. Only in Ravel’s Miroirs is the idiom perfect, but here the Beijing-born, Canada-reared Liu is up against giants on record — Ashkenazy, Richter, Gieseking, Cécile Ousset, Samson Francois, Thibaudet, Pierre-Laurent Aimard — unfair competition for a beginner.

If there were an award for a table of contents, this release would win hands down. Only in Alkan’s fabulous Festin does one get a glimpse of where Bruce Liu might be heading.

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Norman Lebrecht

Norman Lebrecht is one of the most widely-read commentators on music, culture and cultural politics. He is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and other publications. His blog, Slipped Disc, is among the most widely read cultural sites online, breaking exclusive stories and campaigning against human abuse and acts of injustice in the cultural industries.

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