Chopin: 24 Préludes - Brahms: Intermezzo, Op. 117 No. 1 - Schumann: Ghost Variations

The 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition gold medalist plays music by three of the 19th century’s greatest piano composers. The bulk of the program goes to Chopin’s extraordinarily rich and varied 24 Préludes, Op. 28, which he plays with a winning sense of poetry and a sparkling technique. Lu’s Curtis Institute training allows for no weakness in his technical ability and his finger-work is very fine. Brahms’ most popular intermezzo is played with a lovely feeling for its mood of gentle melancholy before we end with those strange, final compositional thoughts written before his voluntary admission to an asylum, where he spent the final two years of his life. Lu gauges its atmosphere superbly.