Jan Lisiecki FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Complete Nocturnes

 

COMPLETE NOCTURNES

 

Matthias Goerne / Jan Lisiecki LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Lieder

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Jan Lisiecki / Academy of St Martin in the Fields BEETHOVEN Complete Piano Concertos

Getting a head start on the impending Beethoven 2020 festivities, Canada's Jan Lisiecki has today surprised us with Beethoven: Complete Piano Concertos, his fifth album for the Deutsche Grammophon label.

The three-CD set was recorded in December 2018 at Berlin's Konzerthaus, one of the stops on Lisiecki's tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, when he was filling in for an indisposed Murray Perahia.

"The substitution for Murray Perahia was presented to me as a proposal to play any two Beethoven concertos," Lisiecki explained to CBC Music recently. "When I understood the concept of the tour, I requested that if I am indeed to substitute, the original structure would be upheld and I would play all five concertos on tour and in Berlin."

The recording, produced in a matter of a few days, was quickly chosen by Lisiecki's label, Deutsche Grammophon, to launch its Beethoven 2020 rollout. "The recording is entirely live, we could only record the rehearsal and the concert; no touch-up sessions were available. The final result, I hope, is a reflection of a very successful and dynamic live cycle of these concertos."

As with his February 2019 Mendelssohn release with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, for this set of Beethoven concertos Lisiecki and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performed without a conductor.

"I love working with a conductor, and I also thoroughly enjoy working directly with the orchestra musicians," he notes. "The vigour, the focus, the musicianship are all heightened by the direct contact between the musicians and the soloist, and we do everything as one. It is often said that all orchestral performances are an enlarged form of chamber music, but I think this holds true especially in such a compressed setting."

Jan Lisiecki / Orpheus Chamber Orchestra MENDELSSOHN

Despite his youth, twenty-three-year-old Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki has already built up a long list of achievements. Having skipped four grades, he graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. He began performing in public as a child, recorded his first album as a teenager, and made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2016, when he was still only twenty.

Felix Mendelssohn was a year younger than Lisiecki is now when he wrote his First Piano Concerto in G minor; the work was dedicated to the seventeen-year-old pianist Delphine von Schauroth, then the object of the young composer’s affection. Cast in three movements, it is a lively, spirited work, at times requiring lightning-quick playing. Lisiecki finds it remarkable that the concerto begins as if “in the middle of a piece”, and particularly appreciates the buoyancy of this early work – he thinks of it as like “a nature trip” and notes that its “lightness of touch ... reminds [him] very much of playing Mozart”.

Lisiecki sees the Second Piano Concerto in D minor, which Mendelssohn wrote immediately after his honeymoon in 1837, as providing a certain contrast with the First. “The Second Concerto has darker and deeper emotions,” he says. “It’s less secure, it’s uncertain, it’s not so confident, it’s searching.” He adds that it reminds him in some ways of Schumann, with its “rapid emotional changes and unprepared character swings”. He found it the more challenging of the two to record, not only because of its shifting moods, but also because of the intricacies of its orchestral accompaniment – as he points out, compared to the First Concerto, in the Second there is “more dialogue between the piano and the individual instruments”.

He chose to record the concertos with one of the world’s leading chamber ensembles, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. This elite group of players from New York are unusual in that they rehearse and perform without a conductor. “Everybody was involved in the musical process,” explains Lisiecki. “That was quite amazing to see. Usually it’s the conductor and I who are listening, but here you have a group of twenty people all listening to what was just done and hearing for themselves what they will change. That was a different experience.”

Lisiecki is opposed to the idea of albums that are essentially “collages” of the works in his repertoire, preferring to bring together works that complement one another programmatically or in terms of their character. On this occasion he has chosen to complement the two concertos with three of Mendelssohn’s finest works for the solo instrument: the Variations sérieuses, the Rondo capriccioso and the “Venetian Boat Song” (Venetianisches Gondellied) from the Lieder ohne Worte. All three are works that mean a great deal to Lisiecki, and he was delighted to be able to include them on this album and give listeners further insight into the composer’s dazzling keyboard writing. (Deutsche Grammophon)

Jan Lisiecki CHOPIN Works for Piano & Orchestra

I think Chopin felt the most comfortable writing for the piano, though it was not necessarily his favorite instrument. He was simply able to use it to its full potential and to express everything that he imagined in his mind. In many ways his writing for piano and orchestra is just and extension of that. It’s not symphonic writing. It’s not writing that uses the full potential of the orchestra. It’s his imagination for the piano enlarged by the writing with orchestra. It adds colors to the piano. We are given endless possibilities already at our instrument. But Chopin uses the capabilities of the winds and the strings, their richness, their sound quality to add to the piano’s possibilities and color palette. It’s a gift that he gave us with these orchestral pieces. 

In a Mozart or Beethoven piano concerto if you removed the orchestra and told the pianist to play their part alone you’d be left with a bare bones structure. There would be some beautiful themes, some beautiful moments, and then there would be these very dull and uninspiring passages because you would be missing the core of the work. Now in Chopin if you take away the orchestra for the most part you would still end up with a fully-fledged and well-developed work. When the orchestra comes in it adds something- another layer- not instead of the piano, not in place of one of the piano themes or capabilities, but yet another relayer, and more beauty. (Jan Lisiecki)

Jan Lisiecki / Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia / Antonio Pappano SCHUMANN

Jan Lisiecki turns to the music of Robert Schumann for his third Deutsche Grammophon album. The 20-year-old Canadian pianist presents strikingly mature and imaginative interpretations of the composer’s complete concertante works for piano and orchestra. Jan Lisiecki: Schumann – Works for Piano and Orchestra, set for international release on 8 January 2016, opens with the evergreen Piano Concerto in A minor op. 54. It also contains the Introduction and Allegro appassionato op. 92, Träumerei op. 15 no. 7 and the rarely heard Introduction and Allegro op. 134, the latter entering the DG catalogue for the first time in the yellow label’s 117-year history. Lisiecki is partnered by the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Sir Antonio Pappano, with whom he made his debut at the 2013 BBC Proms in Schumann’s Piano Concerto. “This proved to be a performance of extraordinary accomplishment,” noted the Guardian at the time.

Jan Lisiecki’s personal vision of Schumann’s poetic works has evolved over several years, backed by meticulous preparation and deep immersion in the music. His approach to the Piano Concerto and the other concertante works has also gained from Antonio Pappano’s guidance and encouragement. The album reflects the rapport shared by soloist, orchestra and conductor. Recorded in September 2015 under studio conditions in Rome, it renewed a musical relationship forged three years earlier when Lisiecki, then aged 17, performed Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Pappano and his Santa Cecilia forces during a five-concert European tour in which he alternated as soloist with Martha Argerich.

“These pieces demand an incredibly close collaboration in order to accomplish what Schumann desired,” comments Lisiecki. “I believe the sound of the Santa Cecilia Orchestra matches mine in the best possible way.” The Piano Concerto and other concertante works, he adds, are concerned above all with subtle shades of expression and intimate dialogue between soloist and orchestra. “Of course the Piano Concerto is virtuosic. But it’s virtuosic in a way that’s in the background, and that’s what speaks to me.”

Antonio Pappano, himself an accomplished pianist and tireless supporter of young musicians, recalls his first experience of hearing Lisiecki’s pianism. “I’ll admit that I was overwhelmed with envy when I first heard Jan play. What is so refreshing is that there are no fake layers of age added on – just youth,” he notes. “We’ve now worked together many times and this Schumann project provided a perfect opportunity to work on two pieces that are so rarely heard in concert, as well as to revisit a concerto that is a shared favourite.”

Jan Lisiecki’s previous releases as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, comprising piano concertos by Mozart and Chopin’s Études opp. 10 & 25, have attracted critical acclaim and strong international sales. In 2013 he received the Leonard Bernstein Award at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and was also named as Gramophone’s “Young Artist of the Year”.

The pianist’s forthcoming engagements include two tours of the United States this January, the first with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Peter Oundjian, the second with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. During the latter Lisiecki will make his debut in the main auditorium at New York’s Carnegie Hall, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4. His schedule for the remainder of the 2015/16 season also includes an extensive tour of Germany and Switzerland with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and concerto performances with the Cleveland Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. (Deutsche Grammophon)

Jan Lisiecki / Christian Zacharias / Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks MOZART Piano Concertos Nos. 20 & 21

The Deutsche Grammophon label has offered a series of teenage prodigies, not all of whom have lived up to their billing. This release by Polish-born Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki, just 17 and looking not entirely unlike Justin Bieber, may make a bigger splash than most. You might guess from the sheer daring of the interpretations, especially that of the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, that you were dealing with extreme youth here, but no insufficiency of technique or tone gives it away. The Piano Concerto No. 20 is really impressive. Lisiecki and conductor Christian Zacharias, leading the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, set out to create a real old-school recording of this most stormy of Mozart's concertos, and they succeed in forging something that's quite detailed and coherently worked out. It might also be called over the top, but that's something to be decided by the individual listener Lisiecki deploys a big sound, and he and Zacharias add on tempo variations, ornaments, and sudden dramatic gestures, topping the whole thing off with Beethoven's underutilized cadenza for the first movement. It's sort of as if one of the big Russian-schooled pianists of the middle part of the last century had decided to record the work with Leopold Stokowski as conductor, and Zacharias' contribution is key: he ruffles the orchestra's strings into spiky little attacks. In the Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467, they are not quite as distinctive, but the breadth and control of Lisiecki's playing is nevertheless impressive, and in a world in which young students are disinclined to take chances he deserves all kinds of credit. (James Manheim)

Jan Lisiecki CHOPIN Études

Young pianist Jan Lisiecki has been studying at the Glenn Gould School of Music in Toronto and it seems the Canadian genius’s flair and sense of adventure has rubbed off on the 18-year-old. When Deutsche Grammophon decided to record Chopin’s Études as a follow-up to his debut album of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos 20 and 21, the Calgary-born youngster felt firmly on home ground. He had already recorded Chopin’s Piano Concertos in F and E Minor in Poland for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute and has a natural affinity for the music. What showed Gould-like daring however was his decision to do each of the 24 pieces in one take. Not only that but he would warm up before each take by playing something completely different – a Bach Goldberg Variation or a little Messiaen. “That would change the mood, in the same way as a different piece would in a live performance,” Lisiecki says. This latest disc shows why he was so quickly snapped up by the German label. Lisiecki’s touch is light and fluid, much like Chopin’s was reported to be by his contemporaries. He manages a mysterious, distant feel in the Op 10, No 6, but still with a subtle sense of yearning. But the young Canadian muscles up for the many stormy challenges, registering a thrilling defiance in the so- called Revolutionary which closes the Op 10 set with four defiant chords, and chilling us to the bone in the Winter Wind Étude. The lovely Cello Étude (Op 25, No 7), the longest of the works, is played with beautiful balance. Sometimes described as a conversation between two lovers – with the male left hand getting all the best lines – Lisiecki brings out the mini-drama which plays out in just under six minutes: the love, the raised voices and then the consoling embrace. The listener is very much ‘in the moment’ as this glorious slideshow of works rolls out with a superb sense of freshness under Lisiecki’s fingers. First class. (Copyright © Limelight Magazine. All rights reserved)