Ahh, Chiu! A spellbinding performance
From The Hawk Eye Newspaper
Ahh, Chiu! A spellbinding performance
By BOB SAAR
for The Hawk Eye, Iowa
Pianist Frederic Chiu was teaching Piano 101 last night at Burlington's Memorial Auditorium and no one bolted from the classroom.
Chiu began his Civic Music performance with a brief history and unique overview of his instrument, pointing out that the piano revolutionized society in the same way as did the printing press and the computer.
In that sense, it's nothing more than another machine.
"The piano is just a series of buttons with preset notes," he pointed out. Anyone can sit down and immediately make coherent sounds, which is definitely not the case with, say, the cello or the bassoon.
Chiu then demonstrated what that machine can do with a little practice, and by the end of his first set, both he and the audience were breathless.
It is a grand understatement to say that Frederic Chiu can wallop the dickens out of those eighty-eights.
He plays classical music, mind you; not rock and roll.
His first set opened with Chopin's "Five Etudes," which Chiu described as giving the piano the illusion of a singing instrument.
He then proceeded to demonstrate that beautifully.
On into DeBussy and Ravel, and it's hard sometimes to tell which composer is stranger. Actually, sometimes it's hard to tell them apart, but Chiu's command of melodic technique and nuance gave each of the two Impressionistic pieces its own unique character.
At times he gave the illusion of having a three-octave spread on each hand.
Chiu finished with two Prokofiev essays, beginning with three hypnotic excerpts from the "Lieutenant Kije Suite" and ending with "Toccata in D minor."
"Toccata" was reminiscent of a Warner Brothers cartoon soundtrack about World War III in its intensity and dark excitement, and Chiu made it easy to see that late model pop stars like Billy Joel and Keith Emerson copped a lot of their chops from the Russian composer.
Those are compliments of high order, but that's not all, folks.
After intermission, Chiu returned to his seat -- which was an everyday cafeteria-style chair instead of a plush piano bench -- and gave the auditorium's old grand a new voice with Liszt's piano arrangement of the all-familiar Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor.
Chiu's spellbinding performance was enhanced for the audience by the auditorium's new stage, which allowed him to perform in front of the curtains, giving the music a mellower, more open sound and the pianist a dramatic setting well suited to his performance.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
