LUNCH CONCERT WITH SOPHIA LIU

Virtuosity is a prerequisite for artistic careers – and yet it has something of an image problem. Artist biographies like to invoke the profound musicality of their protagonists, while technical brilliance tends to appear as an incidental extra. The fear is that a musician might be misunderstood as a mere acrobat of the fingers.

In Sophia Liu’s case, virtuosity is explicitly part of her artistic signature. Born in Shanghai in 2008, the Canadian pianist is the youngest discovery of this festival edition. Critics have praised her playing as extraordinarily clear, delicate, refined and almost supernaturally fluid. At the same time, the young pianist is celebrated for a technical command with which she explores the limits of her instrument.

She confirms this spectacularly in the lunch concert in the Zeugheersaal of the Hotel Schweizerhof Luzern with works by Charles-Valentin Alkan. As one of the most radical French Romantics, Alkan rivalled colleagues such as Chopin and Liszt with some of the most demanding virtuoso literature. In Le Preux, Allegretto alla barbaresca and Barcarolle, rhythmic, colourful and lyrical elements ignite orchestral textures conceived for the piano.

The variation cycle Le Festin d’Ésope is a pianistic feast that demands boldly forward-driving virtuosity, with rapid octaves, extreme leaps, tremolos and double notes. Chopin’s Polonaise Héroïque then leads into the Romantic sound worlds of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and The Seasons – in arrangements and selections that also reveal the delicate and refined side of Sophia Liu’s playing.

With Balakirev’s Islamey, Sophia Liu concludes the programme with one of the most notorious virtuoso pieces in the piano repertoire – a lunch concert combining lightness, refinement and pianistic boundary-testing.