WAVES: Music by Rameau, Ravel, Alkan

This first full-length studio album from Canadian pianist Bruce Liu, winner of the 2021 International Chopin Piano Competition, offers music by three distinctive French masters. It begins and ends with works by Rameau, written originally for harpsichord. Liu provides the required clarity through dexterous fingerwork, even as he reinvents some textures, bringing a shimmering quality to the rapidly repeating notes of Variation 3 of Gavotte et six doubles. Liu has further scope to delineate character and atmosphere in virtuosic works by Alkan—bringing out their harmonic strangeness and acerbic wit—and in the varied musical depictions of Ravel’s Miroirs, most impressively in “Une barque sur l’océan” which prompts Liu to deliver liquid streams of notes while evoking the surge and power of the sea.