Bruce Liu first came to global attention winning the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2021, but since that success he has been careful to avoid being pigeonholed as a Chopin specialist. He made his British debut with Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, and his first studio disc for Deutsche Grammophon was an all-French programme of Rameau, Alkan and Ravel. Now the Canadian pianist turns his attention to the best known of Tchaikovsky’s piano works, the sequence of 12 character pieces reflecting the months of the year that was composed in 1875 and 1876, to be published monthly in a St Petersburg music magazine.
The pieces making up The Seasons were written quickly, the last seven of them in just five weeks after Tchaikovsky completed the orchestration of his ballet Swan Lake. Both the idea of such a collection and many characteristics of the piano writing look back to Schumann’s examples, but they never aspire to any kind of profundity. They are charming salon pieces, almost guileless, and that is exactly how Liu presents them, never trying to impose a faux seriousness on music that does not need it, but at the same time treating it with enormous respect and obvious affection. His playing is exquisitely polished, but free of mannerisms; every phrase seems to have a totally natural shape and its own colour. Even with the addition of Tchaikovsky’s F minor Romance Op 5 as a filler there’s still less than 55 minutes of music here, but the sheer quality easily outweighs quantity. The whole disc is a model of ego-free piano playing.
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