Pianist Jian Liu: a way of living through music
Pianist Jian Liu - “music is my passion”.
Photo credit: Charles Brooks
Pianist Jian Liu was 15 when something changed in the way he played and listened to music. He was in America, competing in the Southern Missouri International Piano Competition, his second competition in the States. "Something clicked. I felt that music was more than just a skill that you practise and develop; there's a deeper connection."
His teacher from the Central Conservatory in Beijing, Professor Jin Zhang, hadn't been able to join his pupil in Joplin, Missouri. Liu was with his mother and a translator. "We couldn't speak English at all."
He found himself thinking "my teacher's not here, I don't have to do exactly what he tells me to do. I feel free." For the first time, Liu felt that playing music was fun. "I really enjoyed the performance - and won the competition."
This smiling, quietly spoken man is modest about his achievements as a pianist, but since then Liu has won more international prizes and performed on many of the world’s great stages, including Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Centre and Steinway Hall in America, as soloist and concerto musician. In New Zealand he regularly delights audiences as recital soloist, in concertos with our major symphony orchestras and in collaboration with New Zealand’s top chamber musicians.
His teenage win in Missouri was an early career watershed. Listening to his performance was Caio Pagano, an Italian-Brazilian pianist and professor of piano at Arizona State University. The distinguished musician and teacher clearly heard something special in the young Chinese pianist's performance, and invited Liu to Arizona, promising to help him in any way he could.
Liu and his mother wanted first to check out the big American schools of music famous in China, such as Juilliard and Curtis, and so, before accepting Pagano’s offer, they headed to New York for auditions. These were successful and Liu was offered scholarships, but US visa requirements meant returning to China to apply. Knowing the challenges already faced to secure visitor visas for competitions, he was afraid he might not make it back to America.
Pagano stepped in. Liu travelled to Arizona and the intrepid and determined professor drove him across the Mexican border to Tijuana. After what Liu now describes smilingly as "a lot of adventures" the visa issues were solved. Pagano found him a host family near a public high school, and taught him piano free of charge for three years.
The mentoring didn't stop there. After Liu graduated from high school, Pagano found him sponsorship through a philanthropic foundation and he was able to enter piano studies at Arizona State, where he studied with Pagano for the next five years, graduating in music.
Not one to waste an opportunity, Liu also secured two undergraduate degrees in the university’s School of Business. Exploring other academic disciplines didn't move him from his musical path, however. "Music was still my passion."
It has been Liu's passion since, as a small child, he persuaded his parents he needed a piano after hearing one on the street in Qingdao. Liu was an only child, born when China had a one-child policy. His parents had grown up during the Cultural Revolution, so his musical mother had had no opportunity for music lessons. They borrowed money from relatives to buy a piano for their son.
When he moved from his first teacher in Qingdao to Beijing, aged 9, that piano went too, but didn’t fit in the small apartment he and his mother rented. It was housed in the lobby of a military hall, and for six months, preparing for his Central Conservatory audition, he fitted in his daily 5-6 hours of practice late at night or in early mornings, when the hall was not in use.
His strict training in China through the Conservatory gave him all the technical skills a pianist could need, but his deeper understanding of music was greatly developed by his American teachers. Pagano, he says now, “helped me to listen to music, to understand what it is about and to express myself through playing.”
Meanwhile, Pagano believed his pupil need a change after eight years, and recommended a distinguished teacher he knew, German-born pianist Claude Frank, based at the Yale School of Music in Connecticut. “I was very naïve,” smiles Liu, telling the story. “I applied for only that one School – what if I hadn’t got in?”
Luckily, he succeeded in Yale’s highly selective admissions process and Liu spent the next eight years with Frank, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany and former pupil of Artur Schnabel in New York. Frank, who died in 2014, was revered by his students at Yale for his artistry and musical wisdom.
“It was very inspiring,” says Liu. “Frank gave me another aspect of being a musician, a way of living through music. He was so emotional when he played; whatever he did, his musical expression came out. I studied with him for five years and was his teaching assistant for three more. Yale was a captivating place to be.”
Liu’s musician wife Freya Wang is also from Qingdao, and, like her husband, studied in the rigorous Chinese system. Thirteen years ago, she persuaded her husband to apply for a piano-teaching position at the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington.
“I’d never been to New Zealand,” he says. “Freya said ‘it sounds like a wonderful place to live’. Of course, it is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been, but when I arrived it took me some time to adjust to the pace of life. I found it very slow and relaxed, in marked contrast to the American cities and Beijing. But when I met people through music and the university, I found there was so much going on in culture, arts and the community – little by little, I was into it.”
Pianist Jian Liu
…a busy 2024 with a chamber music tour, a major album release and a concerto.
Now Head of Piano Studies and currently Acting Head of School at Te Kōkī, the NZ School of Music at Victoria University, Liu is having a particularly busy 2024, with a chamber music tour, the launch of a major album and an upcoming concerto. He seems to be taking it all in his stride, and says he’s excited by exploring new collaborations and repertoire.
This month he’s on tour with NZSO Principal Cellist Andrew Joyce, playing 14 concerts around the country, promoted by Chamber Music NZ. Though the pair have played together before in larger ensembles, Liu’s never worked one-to-one with Joyce, and he and audiences are greatly enjoying their collaboration.
For the tour programme they’ve each chosen works from their own heritage. Joyce, who is English, is playing Six Studies in English Folk Song by Ralph Vaughan Williams, while Liu has chosen music by Beijing-based composer Fang Dongqing, called Lin Chong, evoking a fascinating fictional character in Water Margin, a novel from Chinese literature.
“And then,” he says, “since we’re both Kiwis now, we’re playing a work by New Zealand composer Dorothy Buchanan, called Soliloquy for Two. And the rest of the programme is ‘meaty’ and romantic, by Brahms and Hindemith.”
Where Fairburn Walked
…a three-disc album of New Zealand piano music performed by Jian Liu.
Available from Rattle Records
Liu has also acknowledged his home in Aotearoa with a major recording and publishing project. Where Fairburn Walked is a three-disc album of New Zealand music for solo piano, scheduled for release this month by Rattle Records. He plays the engaging collection, 37 compositions by 24 New Zealand composers, with his usual thoughtful attention to detail, revelling in the beauties of piano sonority. [You can read my review of the album in NZ Listener soon.]
After securing funding for the project, Liu worked with the Shanghai Music Publishing House, the largest Chinese publisher of classical music, and a set of scores of all the works from the Where Fairburn Walked album, graded in difficulty from easy to challenging, was launched in China in December 2022. He’s sure they’ll be appealing to Chinese pianists at all levels, as well as teachers and students.
“I find New Zealand compositions very honest, very personal, representing the essence of who the creators are, both as composers and people,” Liu says. “I found something similar when I first started teaching here. Both composers and students in New Zealand have a kind of freedom. They’re saying, ‘this is who I am’. It’s refreshing; the composers are bringing their own experience and heritage. And my students want to learn; they’re here because of their passion for music.”
New Zealand Piano Works from the Where Fairburn Walked album published in China
“…appealing to Chinese pianists at all levels.”
His next important New Zealand performing project is in September, as concerto soloist with Orchestra Wellington. It’s his first performance of what he refers to as “a lovely piece”, Ravel’s famous Left-handed Piano Concerto in D Major, composed for Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in WWI.
Ravel, he says, has used the whole keyboard and, if you close your eyes, you wouldn’t realise there is only one hand playing. Are there any issues for the pianist? “One hand has to sound like two,” Liu explains, “and it doesn’t get a break. So, I have to think about relaxing that hand, to release it while supporting the harmony.” In his busy teaching studio at Victoria University, he smiles with his usual calm demeanour. “Perhaps there are some issues of stamina I don’t normally have to think about much.”
Andrew Joyce (cello) & Jian Liu (piano) In partnership tour Chamber Music NZ, music by Bach, Vaughan Williams, Dorothy Buchanan, Fang Dongqing, Hindemith, and Brahms.
Upcoming concerts: Wanaka (18 June), Cromwell (19 June), Oamaru (20 June), Waikanae (22 June), Kerikeri (23 June), Whanganui (26 June), Upper Hutt (27 June), Whakatāne (29 June), Palmerston North (30 June). (More information here)
Where Fairburn Walked A collection of music for solo piano by New Zealand composers from the past century, performed by Jian Liu and recorded and released by Rattle Records as a companion to two volumes of New Zealand Piano Works published in China. (Read my review here; more information and purchase link here)
‘The Secret Society’ - a concert by Orchestra Wellington including Ravel’s Concerto for Piano in D Major (left hand) played by Jian Liu, September 28, 2024 (More information/tickets here)