劉孟捷憾動生命音樂會獲好評

鋼琴家劉孟捷13日晚在紐英崙音樂學院喬頓廳演出「憾動生命的樂章」音樂會，搏得滿場掌聲，觀眾起立致敬。

            劉孟捷的這場音樂會，全場彈奏舒伯特鋼琴奏鳴曲的第四系列。好幾名子女在新英格蘭音樂學院預備學校學鋼琴，甚至本身教鋼琴的聽眾，彼此交談時大讚劉孟捷，聲稱沒聽過有其他人彈舒伯特比劉孟捷彈得更好，強音不噪耳，弱音也圓熟。

            曾經歷過生死存亡，手指變形等挑戰的劉孟捷，特地在音樂會節目冊中為他為什麼要演奏整套的舒伯特奏鳴曲做了解釋。他說，在學生時代，他曾有過更大的野心，想演奏全套的蕭邦及諾赫曼尼諾夫的作品，但在病後復健的重新學彈琴期間，他發現原本以為簡單的舒伯特曲目，其實音階比諾赫曼尼諾夫更難，但樂音所帶來的平靜、充實感覺，引發出人的愛心、耐心，堅忍意志的作用，恰恰是那時他在精神及技巧上所最需要的。

            一名曾在中國擔任外交官的女觀眾會後表示，在她看來，劉孟捷是實力派的鋼琴家，彈舒伯特其實彈得比朗朗還好，強音不噪耳，弱音很圓潤。只是音樂和很多其他藝術一樣，演奏者或表演者實力再好，能否成名，也得看天時、地利、人和等條件配合。在她看來，朗朗能成為演奏界的明星，幾乎囊括了所有名牌在中國的代言權，有很大一部份原因是他不但師從了柯蒂斯音樂學院(The Curtis Institute of Music)院長GaryGraffman這名人老師，還很有魅力的讓樂團喜愛和他合作，不管懂不懂音樂的人，都受吸引，但劉孟捷卻是懂音樂的人都聽得出來，他是真的彈的好。

            刻在新英格蘭音樂學院預備學校進修，即將出第4張個人CD的青年鋼琴家牛牛，這晚也在父親張長峰陪同下出席，還和幾名出席同學各買了張劉孟捷簽名的CD做紀念。另一名年輕鋼琴家黎卓宇也在父母陪同下來到現場聽音樂會。

            中華表演藝術基金會董事長譚嘉陵表示，最難得的還是近年已鮮少出席音樂會的音樂大師Russell Sherman，也為了劉孟捷趕來。

圖片說明：

            音樂會後，譚嘉陵(左)和劉孟捷在後台晤見排隊致意者。(菊子攝)

            拿到簽名CD的致意者在音樂廳走廊中交談。(菊子攝)

a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston

Robert Levin, advisor; Bettina A. Norton, emerita editor; Lee Eiseman, publisher

in: Reviews

April 16, 2013

Simplicity and Steel in Liu’s Schubert

by David Moran

And so continues this spring’s wondrous piano Schubertiade, and to the short list of topmost interpreters—meaning mature, profound, direct, not only technically immaculate—we now must add Meng-Chieh Liu. It felt like, I don’t know, discovering Murray Perahia decades ago.
Professor at the Curtis Institute and Roosevelt University, Liu was presented at Jordan Hall last Saturday evening by the estimable Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts in a program of three Schubert sonatas (A, D, B-flat, D.664, 850, 960). The audience, not large and unusually still at least for quiet moments, included many local notables, among them James Buswell, Donald and Vivian Weilerstein, and Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun.

You don’t necessarily have to conflate life and art and believe, pathetically, that Schubert’s later work is informed by a sense of death impending in order to realize that something latent and strange is going on throughout the mature sonatas: sun, clouds, dark clouds, more sun, then clouded sun, sorrow, balm, all with harmonic fits and starts and distressed abruptions seemingly unearned.

Nor do you necessarily need to know that this particular serious, modest musician was, in his early 20s in the mid-1990s, well into a stellar career when it was brutally interrupted by a three-year ordeal of vasculitis (near-mortal debilitation and including cardiac arrests, chemotherapy, weight loss to 90 pounds, hand tendon surgeries with titanium nail implant, 100%-certain predictions of never playing again, grueling rehab).

At the keyboard Meng-Chieh Liu physically showed none of that, except for some unusual hand and finger formations. Indeed, as another reviewer recently put it about another Liu Schubert recital, the playing was “so flawless that it is a tad embarrassing to report on it.” Musically and emotionally were another story: the evening quickly turned into a rapt, potent experience—“cosmic,” as one veteran Schubert concertgoer put it at halftime.

Schubert’s melancholic mixed weather starts, in my view, with the so-called lesser A-major sonata, D.664. Its sunlit opening sounds cover some ache as usual, and the remarkable short (two pages) ensuing Andante may dramatize failure of some attempt at reconciliation. From the beginning it was clear this was going to be a simple, focused, absorbing, upsetting experience. Liu pedals more than some Schubert pianists, which everywhere strengthened his steely control, somehow. He also perfectly handled the Andante’s ever so slightly unstable rhythm, which many pianists miss. A superb reading.

The D-major (D.850) has always seemed to me surpassing odd—loud start (but not a march), then peculiarly swung about many places, with more recircling than usual—and until this performance was not a piece I really got or, insofar as I did get it, cared for. Liu’s way with it pretty much changed all that. It was as musical and affectionate a performance of this sonata as you’d ever want to hear, and I find nothing so fine on YouTube. The quick opening movement busted out; the Con Moto syncopated rhythms, next, were perfection, including those recurrent poignant cha-cha moments; the Scherzo features new syncopations (Liu really is more attentive to lopsided rhythms in Schubert than other pianists, while always keeping the pulse going) but its heart lies in another grieving, repetitively stabbing middle section. The Rondo starts as one of those mincing musicbox things Schubert likes so much, happy skipping and all, although familiar for such previously public display. Eventually it swings into Beethoven runs, tick-tock exercises, some more poignancy, some more middle Beethoven, and then, to close, some double-time Charleston stuff, winding down to delicacy. Is it rather a mess of moods? Still sounds so to me, but when I have to hear it again, I want it to be a recording of this performance. (Over Schubert’s seas new piano star Charlie Albright creates, rightly or wrongly, more and bigger waves than Liu, but since like so many youngsters all Albright wants is simplicity, perhaps less swooning, I say Meng-Chieh Liu would be the one to study, or indeed study with.)

Was anything improvable in Liu’s cosmic, organically inflected playing? I felt there could sometimes have been more profile, a little more accent or something, to some passages treated a tad blandly. Phrasing likewise: some subsections were neither particularly shaped nor shapely. The entire rich concert-hall dynamic range could have been dropped overall a few decibels. And the octave above middle C was sometimes not loud enough relative to the one below (Schubert is famously “midrangy”). One achievement Meng-Chien Liu shows that I’ve never seen anything like is a complete and amazing seamlessness between silence and sound and back to silence, meaning his initial touch and ending release are, what, featherweight, entranced, effortless, somehow without break of any sort? I suppose this wouldn’t matter in an audio-only recording, although I thought it sounded different too. But it certainly appeared like nothing by anyone else. Mystery fingers.

Of Liu’s B-flat sonata there is not a lot to say. He took a while to settle in, but by repeat time it became hypnotic with every rumble and the quietest of aching pauses. About potentially winceable movements like the Scherzo, Alfred Brendel has said “You must make them worthy,” and Liu’s approach after the Andante sostenuto was altogether purposeful, with the most flowing Trio I have ever heard. And that Andante prior was lit from within, with Liu turning, perhaps personally, its intense, enthralled moments of bittersweet into a convalescent’s holy song of thanksgiving.

David Moran has been an occasional Boston-area music critic for 45 years, with special interest in the keyboard.