Thanks to the Leeds International Piano Competition, the world has been introduced to some outstanding pianists over the past half century. We are thrilled to be working with Warner Classics, who have such a long and distinguished history in discovering and nurturing young musical talent, to bring the latest in that long line of past winners to the world’s attention. And what better way of doing this than with some of the live performances that helped Eric Lu win that coveted First Prize at the 2018 Leeds Competition? 

Paul Lewis cbe and Adam GatehouseCo-Artistic Directors, Leeds International Piano Competition 

ERIC LU Winner of the 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN 1810–1849 From the second round

1 Ballade No.4 in F minor Op.52 9.52

From the semi-final round

Piano Sonata No.2 in B flat minor Op.35 2 I. Grave – Doppio movimento 6.53 3 II. Scherzo 6.10 4 III. Marche funèbre: Lento 8.31 5 IV. Finale: Presto 1.44

Final round First Prize: the Dame Fanny Waterman Gold Medal Terence Judd Hallé Orchestra Prize

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 1770–1827 Piano Concerto No.4 in G Op.58 6 I. Allegro moderato 16.10 7 II. Andante con moto 4.20 8 III. Rondo: Vivace 8.41 62.31

Live recordings

ERIC LU piano HALLÉ ORCHESTRA · EDWARD GARDNER (6–8)

ERIC LU has attended the Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Jonathan Biss and Robert McDonald. He is also a student of Dang Thai Son.

He was a prize winner at the 2015 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw at the age of 17, and he won First Prize at both the 2017 International German Piano Award (Frankfurt) and the 2015 United States Chopin Competition (Miami). Earlier in his career he was awarded First Prize at the Moscow Chopin Competition for Young Pianists, the Minnesota Piano-e Junior Competition and the Ettlingen Competition. He is also a recipient of the Tabor Piano Award from the Verbier Festival Academy.

Eric Lu has performed in recitals and concertos at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Auditorio  Nacional in Madrid, the Alte Oper Frankfurt’s Großer Saal, Warsaw’s National Philharmonic Hall, Jordan Hall in Boston, Taipei National Concert Hall, Beijing Concert Hall, the Strathmore Music Center in Washington DC, and the hall of the NOSPR (Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra) in Katowice. He undertook a tour with the Warsaw Philharmonic in Japan and Korea in the wake of the Chopin Competition, performing in venues such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Seoul Arts Centre, Osaka Symphony Hall and Sapporo Arts Centre. He has been invited twice to give a recital at the Festival “Chopin and his Europe” in Warsaw and the Duszniki International Chopin Piano Festival. Other recent highlights include substituting for an indisposed Dang Thai Son, with two days’ notice, resulting in a return appearance for Lu in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall.

Eric Lu has appeared with numerous world-class orchestras, among them the Warsaw Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Staatskapelle Halle, the National Philharmonic, Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic, Qatar Philharmonic, Orquesta Clásica Santa Cecilia, Orchestra of the 18th Century and New Jersey Symphony.

Eric Lu won First Prize at The Leeds International Piano Competition in September 2018, performing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with The Hallé and Edward Gardner in the final. On his semi-final, The Independent praised a reading of Chopin’s Second Sonata that “took one’s breath away with its measured grandeur”.

On 22 December 1808, Ludwig van Beethoven presented a concert for his benefit at the Theater an der Wien, considered by Beethoven biographer Barry Cooper to be the most remarkable of the composer’s career with respect to content. It offered no less than four world premieres: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Choral Fantasy and the Fourth Concerto, along with several earlier works and an improvised piece that would later appear as the Fantasia Op.77. The concert proved to be Beethoven’s last as a piano soloist with orchestra, due to his mounting deafness.

Inadequate rehearsal time and a shortage of skilled musicians hampered the four-hour-plus undertaking, not to mention extremely cold weather both outside and within the hall. As such, it’s no wonder that the inward and intimately scaled Fourth Concerto made little impact on the audience. It remained relatively neglected until Felix Mendelssohn performed it at an 1836 Leipzig concert, with an enraptured Robert Schumann among the attendees.

The concerto commences with the piano alone for five measures, a most unorthodox gesture that nevertheless provides the first movement’s harmonic, melodic and temperamental DNA. Much of the soloist–orchestra interplay is conversational and chamber-like, with piano writing characterised by intricate filigree and cruelly exposed double notes that benefit from the highest levels of virtuosity and sensitivity. Indeed, the piano’s sole unambiguously declarative moment occurs when the instrument assertively introduces the main theme upon its recapitulation.

A dialogue between a plaintive soloist and a stern, foreboding string section encompasses the central Andante con moto movement. Only towards the end does the pianist rise to fortissimo with intense trills, while the strings recede in turn. Although Franz Liszt likened the music to the legend of Orpheus placating the furies, Beethoven’s pupil (and Liszt’s teacher) Carl Czerny wrote in his 1846 On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’s Works for the Piano that “one cannot help thinking of an antique tragic scene”.

The movement’s softly concluding E minor chord assiduously dovetails into the Rondo’s opening pianissimo theme that starts in C major, then quickly establishes its G major tonic. The piano answers with a decorated variation of the theme, and the movement takes off in high spirits, with sophisticated and often witty interplay between soloist and orchestra.

For all of its popularity with audiences and pianists, Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata No.2 happens to be one of his most atypical works. Its textures largely eschew the filigree, fioriture and decorative passages characteristic of Chopin’s piano writing. Schumann suggested that the four movements had no organic or thematic unity and that Chopin had yoked together four of his maddest children under a single roof. Close scrutiny, however, reveals subtle linkages. Play the Funeral March’s trudging, mantra-like motif in a quicker, more agitated manner, and you perceive the kinship to the Scherzo’s main theme. Similarly, the first movement’s turbulent left-hand eighth notes relate to the enigmatic Finale’s curving phrases.

Much has been made of the first movement introduction’s resemblance to the Beethoven Opus 111 Sonata’s brooding opening measures. Chopin, however, gets right to the point as he plunges straight ahead into the movement’s galloping and agitated main theme. Even the lyrical second subject soon gives way to agitation. The Scherzo’s fiery outer sections, which climax in leaping chords and octaves, contrast with the Trio section’s songful respite. Those satisfied with the Funeral March as a stand-alone entity miss the dramatic understatement with which the final bars segue into the Finale’s unison triplets. In his book Chopin: the Reluctant Romantic, the late Jeremy Siepmann claimed the latter movement to be the boldest and certainly the weirdest Chopin ever penned, relating it to “a colloquy of bats and witches darting over the keys in continuous parallel octaves”.

If the reflective lyricism represented in Chopin’s Nocturnes, Preludes and Scherzi depict mood paintings, landscapes, and other visual images, the more narrative, heroically scaled Ballades evoke a literary context. Schumann recalled a conversation in which Chopin credited four ballads by poet Adam Mickiewicz for inspiring his own instrumental counterparts. It’s uncertain if Chopin actually intended to write programme music that specifically followed each poem’s story line. Yet the lyric, epic, and dramatic elements that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe deemed essential to the literary ballad are clearly present in Chopin’s musical parallels.

Chopin composed his Fourth Ballade in Paris in 1842, revising it the following year, with a dedication to one of his supporters, Baroness Rothschild. Its first theme consists of short melancholic phrases that nevertheless add up to a fluid, forward-moving whole. The composer elaborates the theme upon each subsequent reiteration by way of rhythmic displacement, counter-melodies and decorative passagework. The contrasting second theme frequently interlocks with elements of the first, achieving an amalgamation of sonata and variation form. The music peaks with a group of fortissimo chords, leading into five pianissimo chords that provide the calm before the storm:

a tumultuous, contrapuntally complex coda, jam-packed with dense pianistic hurdles and dramatic fury. In essence, the Fourth Ballade is a work whose elaborate component parts add up to a most fulfilling whole that remains one of Chopin’s supreme creative achievements.Jed Distler

Eric Lu with Adam Gatehouse

As Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic since 2015, Edward Gardner has led the orchestra on multiple international tours, including acclaimed performances across Europe.

Gardner also works as a guest conductor, leading the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and Chicago Symphony Orchestras and the Gewandhausorchester, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, among others.

Having worked as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor from 2010 to 2016, Gardner continues to collaborate with them and to maintain longstanding collaborative links with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (conducting the First and Last Nights of the BBC Proms) and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Music Director of English National Opera for ten years (2006–15), Gardner has worked with many of the world’s major opera companies and has ongoing relationships with La Scala and Opéra national de Paris, as well as New York’s Metropolitan Opera, having conducted the Met’s productions of Carmen, Don Giovanni, Der Rosenkavalier and Werther.

Eric Lu with Edward Gardner

The Hallé Orchestra has a reputation for artistic excellence, ranking it amongst the world’s top symphonic ensembles. Continually seeking ways to enhance and refresh what it undertakes, the Hallé aspires to provide leadership through performance standards, education, understanding and training.

Founded by Sir Charles Hallé in Manchester, the Hallé gave its first concert in the city’s Free Trade Hall on 30 January 1858. Following the death of Sir Charles, the orchestra continued to develop under the guidance of such distinguished figures as Dr Hans Richter, Sir Hamilton Harty, Sir John Barbirolli and, since 2000, Sir Mark Elder.

As well as taking to the stage for around 70 concerts a year at The Bridgewater Hall, its Manchester home, the Hallé places great pride in giving over 40 concerts annually throughout the rest of Britain. Its distinguished history of acclaimed performances also includes televised concerts, frequent radio broadcasts and international tours.

The Hallé has received many awards for its celebrated collaborations with other orchestras and Manchester organisations, as well as its work in the concert hall and on its own recording label, which was launched in 2003. Over a quarter of a million people heard the Hallé live in its 160th Anniversary Season (2017–18), of whom more than 71,000 were inspired by the Hallé’s pioneering education programme. The Hallé is a registered charity.

Edward Gardner is an exclusive artist of Chandos Records and appears with their kind permission.Live recording: 8.IX.2018 (1) & 11.IX.2018 (2–5), Great Hall, University of Leeds; 15.IX.2018, Leeds Town Hall (6–8)Producer: Mathilde GenasEngineer: Vincent MonsRecording equipment provided by Kali SonEditing by Allan RamsayPiano by Steinway & Sons Photography: Janice Carissa (cover); Allan McKenzie (booklet)Design: Paul Marc Mitchell for WLP Ltd � 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition, under exclusive licence to Parlophone Records Limited� 2018 Parlophone Records Limited, a Warner Music Group Companyericlupianist.com · warnerclassics.com · leedspiano.com