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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 over 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, as well as the Romance, Op. 5, which appears as a bonus track on the CD, and a further five salon pieces which appear on the Deluxe Edition of the album.

Tchaikovsky: The Seasons is released digitally, on CD and on vinyl on 1 November 2024. Special editions of both the LP and the Deluxe Edition CD, complete with signed art card, will be available exclusively from the DG Store. A first digital taster track, “June”, will be released on 30 August, together with a performance video, with “August” following on 27 September and “May” on 11 October. A performance video for “October” will come out on the same day as the album.

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Bruce 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.”

The lively months in The Seasons, such as “August: The Harvest”, with its sense of busy activity, or the celebratory “December: Christmas”, form a contrast with the more pensive tone of much of the set. Liu observes that this may have something to do with Russia’s vast landscapes and long winters giving both cause for loneliness and time for self-reflection. Having grown up in Canada, he knows something about such things – unlike Tchaikovsky, however, Liu is a natural optimist. “In ‘October’ we hear melancholy, perhaps at the thought of winter coming, but in Canada it’s a beautiful month with a lot of colourful leaves.”

The most famous piece in the set, and the one Liu heard first as a child, is “June: Barcarolle”. It reminds him of a Chopin nocturne, with its stable left hand part allowing the right hand great freedom up and down the keyboard. The same is true of the Romance, Op. 5, which has an improvisatory feel. Continuing the theme, Tchaikovsky’s own Nocturne, Op. 10 No. 1 and his Un poco di Chopin are among the five additional tracks included in the Deluxe Edition of the album, alongside the Valse sentimentale, Op. 51 No. 2 Rachmaninoff’s transcription of the Lullaby, Op. 16 No. 1 and Earl Wild’s transcription of the “Dance of the Four Swans” from Swan Lake.

Bruce Liu will perform The Seasons at a series of concerts in the winter of the 2024-25 season:
27 November – Liederhalle, Stuttgart · 1 December – Concertgebouw, Amsterdam
3 December – Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris
17 January – Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Kingston, Canada
19 January – Royal Conservatory, Toronto · 24 January – Carnegie Hall, New York
27 January – Prinzregententheater, Munich · 29 January – Musikverein, Vienna
30 January – Rudolf-Oetker-Halle, Bielefeld · 31 January – Frankfurter Hof Mainz