Bruce Liu on Lunaris

Bruce Liu's third studio album Lunaris was our Recording of the Week on 7th August, and I was especially taken by the sensitivity and clarity of his playing, as well as his 'astonishingly fine articulation and dexterity'. I enjoyed speaking with Bruce about the album and the unique path he has been carving since winning the Chopin competition in 2021.

Lunaris strikes me as something of a concept album, and a combination of what you might expect from that title in the Beethoven Moonlight sonata, to more surprising choices. You perhaps wouldn't even expect the Waldstein, let alone the Ligeti and Schoenberg. How did you choose the repertoire? 

Well, that's a long story. The core repertoire I started with was the Beethoven Moonlight, then the connection that I created was not only the moon, but also the light, because the Waldstein is out there - the light, the dawn, this aurora, and the moments before the sunrise. From there I created this idea of thinking that I am a night owl as well, and I think artists have a much more active mind of imagination and creativity in the evening time. So, I think it's a matter not only of describing, let's say, a force of nature, but also a more psychological aspect of a different perception of time, and that's how the other things came up. 

Probably because my dad was a painter, I had a very clear visual aspect and artworks that influenced me during the process of creating Lunaris, for example, René Magritte’s Empire of Light. There are also those Escher paintings that connected with light, you know, these illusions that we have about the moon, and it's not always as beautiful in the way we think of it in the Beethoven.

The real moon is very cold and very dark, and all those bumpy textures and things are very much related in the Ligeti and Schoenberg, and then it becomes more like a mystical creature in the Scriabin sonata, like flying through the stars. 

So, in all these things we explore the light and moon, but in a rather abstract way, and at the end when we finish the album with Cage's dream, that is like leaving an open ending to the story. It's like a journey from intimate human feelings to a very broad, different perception of time, and it doesn't have to be anything specific at the end. 

You have this lovely clean way with the Moonlight, which is so often over-romanticised and weighed down. It's got this lovely momentum to it, yet still with an element of stillness. How did you approach something which is such a well-known part of the repertoire, but bring that freshness to it? 

It's funny because I have always debated whether I should include such a cliché choice but I was talking with many professional colleagues and they actually said people thought it was so cliché that we don't hear it that often anymore, so that's why I decided to go for it.

I think once you dive into the repertoire you find something new all the time, and I don't know how to explain the freshness or anything, but it's probably just life in general, and I suppose it's a matter of going back to the score rather than just being persuaded by all these other interpretations. It's your interpretation of the notes on the page that's key, rather than the tradition of performances that you've heard. 

Talking about tradition is always a never-ending topic, because if you think that in Beethoven's time, the piece should be played on a fortepiano, it's not written for modern pianos. I always imagine that on such an instrument Beethoven would have played it more fluently. Also, there’s the fact that Moonlight was a title that was not written by him but added after his death by a publisher.

In the liner notes for your previous album Waves, you mentioned working with the piano technician quite a bit, and with specific set-up for each piece. Was this also part of the recording sessions for Lunaris? 

Technically we had two pianos, but for one of the Steinways we had two actions that we could exchange, so basically, we had three pianos with two bodies, with the fact that the different keyboard makes not only a change on the articulation, but also on the sound. 

On some pieces I was not satisfied with making it work on one piano. There were always some passages where I felt that it could use a different tone; one piano sounded better for a singing passage, and the other piano sounded better for the more massive, more running wild exploration. So I thought, since it's a recording, why do we have to stick with the old rules, and I said we should experiment when we can. The point of doing a recording is to sound different to a live performance, to make your own kind of craftsmanship work, and it's a new process of creativity, so at some point we had three pianos in one piece. 

You are touring with this recital program, so with all those things in mind for the recording, how do you deal with it differently in the concert hall? 

Well, in the concert it’s very different because in the recording I might struggle with millions of details, because I have the mind that people can just skip to that five seconds or that fifteen seconds anytime in the album, but in a concert it's much more about the overall emotional achievement, and that people won't care about a specific wrong note or a specific phrase. I think what they will remember at the end of the concert is the emotional feeling you communicated, and if they left terrified, in tears, shocked, speechless, overjoyed – however they have been moved by your performance.

It's funny that in the concert I feel like I have much more control of what I'm doing because no matter what happens, if you’re in the audience you have to finish the whole concert or the whole piece to give a rather courteous conclusion or feeling, whereas when you're listening to a recording you can skip to any point in the piece if you want to. In a concert, you have to sit there almost being controlled by me, and you cannot make a conclusion if you haven't finished the whole thing; you must have the whole picture, and this is the art of the live concert.

Thinking about the programme on both the album and in the concert hall, we've got the familiar works and then we've got the Ligeti, the Schoenberg, and even the Mompou is less well-known than the Beethoven and Debussy. Was there any thought that you might be helping people to discover the less well-known works or that some people who might be afraid of the name of Ligeti might find a way into this composer's music? 

Yeah, in a way it is to invite them to know this music that is a bit less known, and I think once you hear it, you feel a connection with it. The Ligeti has rhythmic vitality and basically the repeat of the same motif all over the piece. Probably at the end of the four minutes, you will just keep moving your head in a way like the two-three-two, two-three-two rhythm.

The Schoenberg, I think, is a servant of the transition between, let's say, the more human and the more mystical side of the album, which comes with the Scriabin. It's really like creating a kind of illusion in its expressionism. You know, we immediately think of Dali, and it is introspective and mysterious.

The Mompou is interesting because I was really searching hard to find what else there is with the Clair de Lune title besides Debussy, and then I found this hidden gem. It's really like a kind of distant memory, like back to the old film styles.

One of the things I've noticed about your career since the Chopin competition is that it hasn't been predictable. Waves presented an interesting programme of Rameau, Alkan and Ravel, and then you recorded Tchaikovsky's The Seasons. Is that a conscious decision that you've made to go with your own musical impulses? 

I'm not trying to be different, it just happened because I grew up in a very multicultural background. I was born in Paris, I grew up in Canada, and I have Chinese origins. It's probably also the way I started learning music, and how always with my teacher we studied at least five composers every semester, always with some contemporary music included.  I think at the time it was maybe a little bit hard to understand, but I’m very grateful for the choices that we made, the teachers and myself, and how this created this natural kind of journey for me. I don't really want to do another complete set of Beethoven sonatas, for example, but I want to really always include something for storytelling or some personal conceptual ideas.

There are things that we can enjoy in a big place, but also just music for ourselves, like the Tchaikovsky Seasons, for instance, a journey for myself. That’s like a diary, reminding myself that I'm actually enjoying the twelve months rather than running away for concerts every two days or something, and Lunaris is the same thing. There's intimate moments of the evening and some of the musical ideas come from dreams.

What can we expect from you next?

I am preparing for sessions for my first concerto recordings, but that's all I can share with you at the moment. It's wonderful music though, and I'm excited to share it.