Lunaris

For Canadian pianist Bruce Liu, an album is more than a collection of recordings: it’s a journey. Lunaris is a carefully curated sequence of works that explores light and darkness, reality and the imagination, the intimate and the infinite. It transports listeners from the familiar landscapes of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” and “Waldstein” sonatas to the otherworldliness of John Cage’s Dream, composed almost 150 years later in 1948. “Playing the Beethoven is interesting but has been done millions of times before,” Liu tells Apple Music Classical. “I wanted to find my own purpose in bringing these pieces together.” Dreamed up by Liu in collaboration with his record label Deutsche Grammophon, the word “lunaris” suggests not only the moon (or “luna”) but also the dark and futuristic visions of Andrei Tarkovsky’s early-1970s science fiction film, Solaris. Liu’s voyage takes us beyond the Romanticism of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 8, with which the programme begins, to rarer repertoire, such as the exquisite moonlit miniatures of Federico Mompou, inspired by the French folk song “Au clair de la lune”, and Reynaldo Hahn’s haunting depiction of wintriness, or “hivernale”. “The night-time is a state of being—it feels fragile and suspended,” he says. “That’s when creativity starts for me. The external world becomes quiet, but the inner world opens up a space for imagination and dreams.” A self-confessed night owl, Liu says he wanted to evoke the solitude and stillness of the late hours when, after giving a concert, his thoughts are free to roam. Debussy’s Rêverie, the album’s third piece, “captures that moment when consciousness begins to drift, that sense of a threshold between the real world and the world of dreams,” he says. The delicate folkish tolling of Danish singer-songwriter Agnes Obel’s Tokka, too, evokes a sense of being suspended in time while Alexander Siloti’s arrangement of JS Bach’s Prelude in E Minor, BWV 855 is “closer to a kind of meditation, an atmosphere. After the intimacy of Chopin and the dreamlike Debussy, it’s as if everything is reduced to its essence—the music seems to just breathe in a calm way and every note carries a sense of inevitability. The clock has stopped, and then we can start exploring the human side again.” That human side emerges most forcefully in the struggle, from darkness to light, of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata. But there is always a sense, too, of something otherworldly in the sound that Liu produces throughout this album. Listen again to the immaculate clarity with which every note of the melody sings out in Chopin’s Nocturne: it’s unreal. Rather than using just one concert grand piano throughout, Liu recorded this album on two pianos—a Yamaha, and a Steinway with two keyboards—sometimes performing the same work on each keyboard before combining different takes during post-production. “In a concert, you’re always sacrificing your choices because you only have one instrument,” he says. “In the studio, I thought, ‘Why not experiment?’” For Liu, the editing process is just another means of exploring the myriad colours that are at play here, such as in Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 4—a mystical journey towards “infinite luminous possibilities” inspired by the composer’s synaesthesia (an ability to “see” notes and keys as colours). It’s also one of the ways in which Liu can enhance the cool detachment of Ligeti’s Etude No. 4 and the cerebral otherness of the first of Schoenberg’s atonal 6 Kleine Klavierstücke. Meanwhile, in the John Cage, in which the same material is heard three times, Liu uses a different keyboard for each section, helping to produce the perfect ending without a resolution. “After all these different forms of night, there’s no longer drama or direction, only sound and time,” he says. “Everything is suspended.”