For you all to know: Kate is the queen in Poland. She is invited to the most significant classical music festival in Warsaw, Chopin and his Europe, every year since coming back from the hand injury. And her recitals / concerts are always sold out. I personally attended every one of them but the most risky one, in 2020, including the last one, with two Beethoven sonatas and the Chopin's op. 30 turning into Schumann's op. 13 without a break. The recital that simply must be transformed into an album. Her not winning the whole thing in 2015 is still being discussed, only recently our best critique again shared their view she should have finished first or at least the second. And I suppose most of the Polish music lovers agree. She has just opened the season in the Polish Baltic Philharmonic, like 3 weeks ago, with Grieg. She has a godlike status here. Never enough of praising her. Just please convince her to agree to finally publishing one of her performances with the Chopin Institute!
since you are here @benlawdy, I may tell you a secret: I even have Kate's autograph from right after her playing in the final round. My biggest treasure!
I am absolutely enamored with Kate Liu's Chopin interpretations. She is an artist with a rare, individual voice, and she captures the spirit of Chopin so well. I think the way she has been relatively neglected by the recording industry is a shame. The Warsaw audience in 2015 had better instincts than the jury: She would have been a deserved 1st prize winner.
There is no other pianist like Kate Liu... she is so special .. so unique.. This year i had the chance to travel from Greece to Warsaw to hear her live for the first time and a dream came true.. Her recital was phenomenal, especially her rendition on Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques was out of this world..! Her playing is characterized by a deep emotional connection to the music and her performances also convey a sense of introspection and sincerity, drawing the listener into the heart of the music ...Sadly, many jurors tend to favor perfectionists or 'technique machines' (I won’t mention any names) over artists like Kate, who dive deeply into the soul of the music. She is a unique artist in every sense.
I was mesmerized by her performances. I only WISH she would sign a recording deal so I can hear her perform Chopin and Mozart and Beethoven, and more. Us fans want those CDs! : )
Ahhhh I’m so happy to see this; I’ve obsessively watched this performance of op 62 no 1 since first seeing it in 2015, it might very well be the most compelling and moving solo performance I’ve ever seen, of anything. It feels like anyone who has seen Kate Liu play (online or, I’m sure, irl) doesn’t ever forget it - she just has something…something! Loving this channel!
She is one of my three top favorite contemporary pianists. Unfortunately, there is only one album of her stunning performances on the market. She hates publicity and social media, and her performances are not live streamed anymore. The only time she performed in Fort Lauderdale where I live, her recital was scheduled on a Monday at 3:00 pm. None of us fans were able to go, because we had to work at that time.
I originally stumbled upon Kate Liu while the 2015 Chopin Competition was being streamed on RU-vid, and her performance of this Nocturne was the 1st piece I heard her play. I’ve been a huge fan ever since. To this day I remain disappointed, and more than a little annoyed, that she has been overlooked by the major record labels. If you’re unfamiliar with her, Kate Liu’s 2015 Chopin Competition performances are on RU-vid, and they are all revelatory. I especially love her gorgeous F Minor Ballade: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UMSwmDK-sTM.htmlsi=xpgUkqNK1LaBgY_3 Thanks to Garrick Ohlsson for bringing some extra attention to this wonderful artist. 😎🎹
And BY THE WAY, since you said in the 2nd episode that op. 37 no. 2 is rarely played. Actually I had the privilege of being able to listen live from the first rows to Kate playing it in 2021. It's gorgeously recorded, as always during the aforementioned Chopin and his Europe festival. Enjoy: ru-vid.commNPpmyCDOVE?si=wxvmsEUnKycTD_S-&t=2209
I fully agree with the statements in this video. However, this video comes a bit late. Let's not forget that back in 2015 five of the jurors did not even want to promote Kate Liu to the 2nd round of the competition. At the end - in the finals - Kate Liu was the only contestant to receive three maximum 10s but finished 3rd because of low scores from some well known jurors. This means that some pianists with world famous names did not recognise back in 2015 what wonderful and magical piano playing sounds like.
And to be precise, one of them was Martha Argerich. That's why nobody is crying after her but also after Yundi and Adam Harasiewicz: they will not be in the jury in 2025 and nobody cares. Of course Dina Joffe also didn't promote Kate to the 2nd round, but she will be a guest in the next episode, therefore I will not elaborate on her. Same goes with Nelson Goerner, the pupil of Martha, heavily promoted by her. He also wanted Kate out after the 1st round back then. A "coincidence", right? And after last Geza Anda competition, (where a friend of Martha, Mikhail Pletnev, ruined Kate's chances in Mozart concerto, by awful conducting, only to promote his countryman), we also learned Martha probably still doesn't recognise Kate's talent: the virtuoso coming from the Eastern Europe with the right connections won with a nice but soulless comparing display, after Kate being excluded after the semis. Not much of a surprise from Martha after all honestly.
I didn't know Dina didn't promote Kate after the first round! :O Did she and Martha, etc, vote for Kate later on in the competition? I have Dina in this same episode reflecting back on her performance of the same Nocturne in 1975, which I'm posting later today (and I segue from Kate, so... I guess that's slightly awkward). I really like that performance too, and found Dina to be a lovely and humble woman in my interview with her. Just because these jury members don't necessarily see the same thing we see in Kate doesn't mean they're bad or wrong - it's a testament to the varying preferences for how Chopin should be felt. As Garrick himself says in his interview, "it's ridiculously subjective." Also, part of being a singular artist is having the courage to adopt interpretive approaches that make lots of people love you, but also turn others away. This is preferable to playing neutrally, so as not to offend anybody, because then you also won't inspire anybody. I should also say that I know Kate a little bit and presented her on a concert series I used to organize in New York several years ago. She played the Brahms Ballades - a heavenly performance, I thought. But I was sitting with a pianist who happened to have advanced a couple rounds in the 2015 competition and he said about Kate's performance that there was "no line." I disagreed, but I knew where he was coming from - when you adopt a hypnotic approach, like Kate, it is more difficult to bring out the music's forward-moving, purposeful qualities - if that's even a priority. This is part of artistic decision-making. It would be strange if all artists agreed with each other on everything, no?
@@benlawdy yes and no. They all reconsidered when it comes to YES/NO decicions, i.e. whether to promote to the next stage or not, (all but Yundi in the 2nd round). Kate was even co-leading after the 3rd stage, in both YES/NO category and points. But Martha and Goerner didn't like her that much still, same as Yundi, giving her consistently less points than the others. (That's the pattern, cause of course someone liked her more in this or that round. But these are details. Like that Alexeev didn't like her 3rd stage or Akiko Ebi her e-minor. It happens. Maybe that was the case with Dina Joffe, that's also why I didn't want to speculate about her, more below). What's more interesting though is that a quick glance at the wikipedia jury scoreboards shows one thing: Martha and Nelson gave Kate EXACTLY the same number of points in the 1st, 2nd, and the 3rd round. And almost the same in the final stage. 🥲 i.e. after the finals they placed her outside of the podium. While, last but not least, what's the most important for the podcast: Dina Joffe reconsidered fully it seems and started giving Kate both YES and looots of points from the 2nd stage on and finally: the podium.
@@benlawdy and of course, we must keep in mind that Polish audience is, maybe even surprisingly at times, open. Open is the word. But also simply refined, oftentimes more "progressive" than the jury - decades of having Chopin Competitions were not in vain! Not every capital in the world opens up the biggest classical music festival in the country with a... solo recital on the period instrument, don't you think? (And Eric Guo who is really, really popular here since a year, did that two months ago). This kind of ethereal feel of Kate's interpretations is unique, hypnotic as you named it, (in Polish there is also a word like "oneiric", but I don't know the exact connotation of it in English), but not risk-less. Fully agree. And I understand the person you talked with then too. But fortunately we have Jed who knowing thousands of the albums can always recommend some equally brilliant recording but interpretationally standing on the absolutely opposite side of the fence. That's why after listening to Kate yesterday, I'm listening to the Hough's op. 37 no. 2, whose nocturnes Jed praises so much, exactly now when writing and I am very happy about it ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-zMvkEcs4flc.htmlsi=UBbuW8UqTjxBvCUy
Her performance of Chopin’s 2nd Piano Concerto at the finals of the 2015 Chopin Competition has over 1.7 million views. It is a uniquely beautiful performance. The audience clearly adored her. Even the conductor could not hide his enthusiasm: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rs8rrW4s_rs.htmlsi=IHZ5E30IU-3fTuJ 😎🎹
Tiffany Poon is possibly the best pianist out there. She did not win this competition and that goes to show that music competitions are not fit for purpose. Unless the purpose is to crush imagination. To crush individuality. To crush true genius.
