Seventeen-year-old pianist Sophia Liu opens the Gilmore Piano Festival’s fall Rising Stars series this Sunday, Sep 20 with a program built around one of classical music’s most punishing, least-performed composers.
Speaking with Cara Lieurance, Liu explains why she has centered her Kalamazoo recital — and a companion performance in January at Le Piano Symphonique in Lucerne, Switzerland — on four works by the 19th-century French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan. She has admired Alkan since childhood, despite music she calls nearly unplayable. “There’s so much passion, there’s so much fire, there’s so much imagery in his music,” she says, arguing that his reputation for sheer technical difficulty has obscured a real depth. She calls the neglect of Alkan’s catalog “such a shame,” noting it stems partly from how few pianists can manage it.
After Alkan, the program moves to Chopin, then to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and selections from The Seasons, before closing with Balakirev’s Islamey…