A New Year: Bruce Liu and Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons

Antonio Vivaldi isn’t the only composer who looked at the whole year to put it into music. He used the vehicle of a violin concerto. Pyotr Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, put it all in the hands of a pianist and created 12 characteristic pieces that reflect each of the months. More than just portraying The Seasons, Tchaikovsky’s 12 works encapsulate The Months, each with a different theme. Canadian pianist Bruce Liu brings us a new recording of Tchaikovsky’s characteristic pieces in a quietly stunning performance.

Bruce Liu

The work was commissioned by the music journal Nuvellist, which published one piece a month. The intended audience was not supposed to be virtuosos but the regular readers of the magazine – the home player.

The style is approachable, and the feelings are often quite direct: comfort, melancholy, reflection, meditation. These more solemn ideas are broken up by the points of happiness, such as the Song of the Lark (March) with a melody line that reflects that high-flying bird’s song (see, for example, Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending that does it as a violin solo).

Other months, like September, which covers The Hunt are powerful and prancing in presentation. November’s Troika captures the three-horse sled beloved of Russian winters.

Boris Kustodiev: Maslenitsa, 1916 (St Petersburg: Isaak Brodsky Museum)

Two different holidays are caught up: Carnival in February and Christmas in December. February captures the sounds of ringing bells and the happiness in the streets. Cold December is more formal, filled with austere family waltzes but with the underlying happiness that the season holds.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: XII. December. Christmas

Leading up to the joys of summer, June: Barcarolle, keeps the earlier sad notes found in the preceding month, but with the model of the program music being written by Liszt and Berlioz, Tchaikovsky paints a real visual of a Venetian gondolier song.

Alex Hai, gondolier to the Marcello family, 2015

Finally, melancholic winter and spring give way to celebratory Summer, particularly in July’s The Reaper’s Song. August: The Harvest continues the happiness and atmosphere of celebration as the year’s work comes to a successful close.

The album closes with Romance, Op. 5. In a sense, it summarises all the different feelings of The Seasons, but for a more virtuosic player. Bruce Liu appreciates the changes in feeling during the different months and also brings out the Russianness of Tchaikovsky’s ‘romantic and melancholy soul’.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: 6 Pieces, Op. 51, TH. 143 – No. 6, Valse sentimentale

Canadian pianist Bruce Liu was first prize winner of the 18th International Chopin Piano Competition 2021 in Warsaw and has gone on to perform both chamber and concerto concerts with international orchestras in Germany and Switzerland. Appearances in the 2024–2025 season include Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Houston Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra.

Bruce Liu
Tchaikovsky: The Seasons
Deutsche Grammophon: 00028948663194
Launch date: 1 November 2024

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