For much of this recital by Eric Lu I was transported back to the early part of the 19th century when every middle-class family had its own piano in the salon, the focal point of all domestic entertainment. Those prime living spaces would have rung to the sounds of music written by Bach, Schubert, Handel and Mendelssohn, the first four of Lu’s chosen composers. Pieces that were never so technically challenging that amateurs baulked at the thought of assaying them on an upright. Yet the notes themselves are just a start; it is what lies behind and beneath them that matters.
Lu started with Bach’s only surviving instrumental piece which is programmatic: nothing less than a Capriccio on the departure of a most beloved brother. In six short movements the listener is taken from an opening Arioso in which friends gather to dissuade the individual from his determined course to a concluding fugue that imitates a postillion’s horn. Lu’s unusually plaintive trills at the outset cast a pall of sadness which extended through to the fifth movement in which the intractability of the situation becomes clear. I was not persuaded that Lu is a compelling interpreter of Bach: the central Adagissimo needed playing that was more hushed and withdrawn by way of contrast. Instances of injudicious pedalling here and elsewhere too were a slight distraction.
Was I the only person to assume wrongly that Schubert would provide a degree of consolation? The four Impromptus D.899 were written in Schubert’s final year. Was some of the repressed rage at the cards he had been dealt in life seeking a vent here? At any rate, the way Lu played the opening bare G octave with compelling force, and held it longer than usual, was a mere prelude to the C minor turbulence that followed. There was all the heartache from the contemporaneous song cycle Winterreise as well as delicate pointing to world-weariness in Lu’s veiled tones. But it was the venom he also found that was quite shocking. This was music designed to chill the soul.
The E flat major Impromptu continued to show Lu’s powers as an interpreter. He took Schubert to the edge of later Expressionism; the notes were raw, hard, ugly even, black in colour and mood, percussive and insistent to the point of neuralgia. Nor was there much balm in the third Impromptu, where the darkness was never quite banished, the raw knuckles of the left hand sinister and dominant. I also felt the nerve-jangling pain in the concluding piece, where the return of the main theme was like looking in a cracked mirror and recalling a once-perfect image.
Handel’s Suite no. 5 and the four choices from Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words proved a short respite before Lu unleashed further cavernous power in Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata no. 7 in B flat major. The initial torrent of notes suggested unremitting fire and fury before ceding to a slower and softer section where Prokofiev displays his lyrical soul, weaving his melodic lines like a caged songbird until the grimaces, scowls and open-jawed snarls of lived wartime experience reasserted themselves in the clangorous dissonances. Even here, Prokofiev wouldn’t be Prokofiev without the backward glances: Lu picked out the militaristic refrain of the March from the Love for Three Oranges with appropriate sardonic humour.
His sole encore, Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude, was delivered with crystalline elegance and exquisite poise, but when the D flat major descends into C sharp minor it was like drawing back a shroud from a corpse. Lu certainly loves his dark and deep spaces, and I love him for them too.
