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)
