Program Notes: Pianist Bruce Liu

By Tristan McKay

In this program, Bruce Liu showcases works by bold and pioneering composers that challenged the status quo. At the heart of the program are three piano sonatas spanning 250 years of music history that defy our expectations of form, style and aesthetics. While these works reflect the divergent musical languages unique to each composer, they all left their mark on the spellbinding frontiers of music history.  

Franz Joseph Haydn’s musical inheritance was steeped in the galant tradition, in which composers turned away from the dense and highly ornamented writing of their Baroque predecessors and instead placed value on melody, simplicity and clarity. Famously employed as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family from 1761–1790, Haydn composed a staggering 30 of his 52 keyboard sonatas during his employ. While his early keyboard sonatas maintain this unpretentious galant character, he later explored a contrasting aesthetic in the passionate and intense characters of minor keys — perhaps an expression of the isolation he felt while working and residing at the family’s palace in the remote Hungarian countryside.  

Composed in 1776, the Piano Sonata in B minor Hob. XVI:32 channels characters with varying shades of darkness across three movements: Allegro moderato, Menuet and trio and Presto (finale). From the start, the Allegro showcases a quiet drama with its impertinent and brooding opening theme. In lieu of the typical slow second movement, Haydn situates similarly contrasting material in the sweetly fluttering minuet and impassioned trio. The sonata ends with a toe-tapping finale that features racing melodic passages and obstinate repeated notes.  

While the keyboard sonata remained a staple of the piano repertoire through the end of the 18th century, by the time Frédéric Chopin composed his Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, Op 35 in 1837–1839, the sun was setting on the golden age of the sonata. Despite its immediate success with audiences, critics questioned whether Chopin properly utilized the sonata’s typical structure. Robert Schumann famously chastised the work’s four movements: “Chopin has simply bound together four of his most reckless children.” Today, the work is regarded as a masterpiece and remains enormously popular for its dramatic depictions and daring eccentricities. 

In the opening Grave – Doppio movimento, four bars of powerful chords set the stage for an agitated and stormy opening theme, with a gently lilting and expressive secondary theme entering shortly after. The second movement Scherzo features an eruption of raucous and athletic repeated chords and octaves, with a contrasting and sensuous middle section.  

Although the iconic Marche funèbre is the third movement of the sonata, it was the first that Chopin completed. With its darkly knelling harmonies and opening melody that fixates on a repeating Bb note, his funeral march has become synonymous with death in popular culture. In the middle of the movement, a nocturne-like trio offers a reprieve of tranquil introspection, an oasis in a desert of despair. The fourth and final movement, Finale: Presto, is an unexpectedly abstract conclusion to the sonata with its tireless and chromatic running passages and absence of melody. Pianist Arthur Rubinstein has a chilling interpretation of the Finale: “one hears the winds of night sweeping over churchyard graves, the dust blowing and the dust that remains.”  

Nikolai Kapustin is something of an enigma. Born in Ukraine in 1937, the Soviet composer of Russian-Jewish descent composed works that blend jazz and classical aesthetics until his passing in 2020. His Variations Op. 41 from 1984 begins with a riff inspired by the opening bassoon solo from Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, which is later developed across seven variations. The streams of jazz styles utilized in the work come to a head in a rousing and virtuosic final variation.  

Composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau made history with his landmark Treatise on Harmony (1722), which solidified the foundational system of harmony in western classical music and paved the path for composers of future generations. He is also a celebrated master of 18th-century French harpsichord music — alongside François Couperin — and is lauded for his operas, a genre he began to explore shortly before turning 50. 

Published from 1706–1727, Rameau’s three books of Pièces de clavecin (Pieces for Harpsichord) were widely circulated across Europe. Whether performed on harpsichord or piano, these imaginative and virtuosic works have an abundance of charm. Les Tendres plaints (“The Tender Complaints”) is an evocative study in character with its lilting and nuanced melodies and Les Cyclopes (“The Cyclops”) portrays the titular one-eyed monster from the ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey, attributed to Homer.  

Menuet I and II were featured in Rameau’s comic opera Platée, and Les Sauvages (“The Savages”) in his opera-ballet Les Indes galantes (“The Amorous Indies”). In La Poule (“The Hen”), Rameau imitates the pecking barnyard creature with impertinent repeated notes; Gavotte et Six Doubles (“Gavotte and Six Doubles”) takes a relatively simple theme and embellishes upon it in six colorful variations.  

Sergei Prokofiev’s status as an iconoclast and 20th-century innovator is belied by the approachable nature of his ballet Romeo and Juliet and his orchestral tale for children, Peter and the Wolf. Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in B flat major, Op. 83, with its violent dissonance and relentless drive, shows an entirely different side to the composer.  

Completed in 1942, it is the second of three “War Sonatas” that biographer Daniel Jaffé argues “expressed his true feelings” towards Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin. In the first movement, Prokofiev dually honors and critiques the traditional sonata form with hyperbolic and highly contrasting themes, almost as if in caricature. The opening theme blazes ahead with capricious and explosive energy while the second theme softly meanders, almost without direction. The second movement begins with a theme quoted from Robert Schumann’s song “Wehmut” (“Sadness”). Prokofiev explores the dual nature of sorrow and beauty, as the tender theme is gradually abstracted and later subsumed by the thunderous din of hammered chords. The third and final movement is a showstopping toccata that barrages the pianist with relentless octaves and tightly interlocked rhythms that culminate in a thunderous finale.