Catalogue Connection: 25228

Jenny Q is being lined up as the Nigel Kennedy of piano (she’ll probably just be Jenny or the Bond-like Q eventually). She’s not just a pianist: she founded and manages the Face Art Institute, a Shanghai-based body devoted to international exchange of music and musicians, served on the board of Ear to Mind, a contemporary music organisation in New York, and is based in Shanghai and in California, where she is a faculty member at the University of California. The New Yorker described her as “A pianist whose dazzling facility is matched by her deep musicality.”

This is her first album of classical pieces, after previously releasing more modern music, and she clearly wants to reach a mass market.

The album opens with a section of the Goldberg Variations, possibly because you can’t go wrong with Goldberg, possibly because it’s a sign of reassurance but also possibly because much of what follows is technical and a little cold while the Goldberg is warm and slow.

The album was conceived as a tribute to her teacher, Seymour Lipkin. She writes in the sleeve notes: “I wanted to evoke Mr Lipkin and Beethoven, without actually recording Beethoven,” so Beethoven is evoked by Charles Ives. He quotes the famous beginning of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in The Alcotts from the Concord Sonata, the second track, and is as reflective as the opening Bach.

Chai learned Robert Schumann’s work from Lipkin, and his Kreisleriana makes up the bulk of the album (35 minutes of 51), with its eight movements. This is a contrast in both tone — it’s very dramatic — and playing, each piece with contrasting sections. The sleeve notes comment on Schumann’s self-described split personality, “Florestan the Wild” and “Eusebius the Mild”, resembling his own manic depression, and the music across the pieces alternates between the wilder and the calmer. She played the piece at her graduation recital, so knows it really well. It’s technically really impressive but not as organic as the first two pieces and a little harder in tone. An impressive album, though.

The esteemed pianist Jenny Q Chai interprets the work of Bach, Ives, and Schumann here, where her inimitable and meticulous finger acrobatics make for a very exciting listen.

Bach’s “Aria”, from ‘Goldberg’ variations, opens the listen with Chai’s agile and very stirring piano work that is quite heartfelt, and Ives’ “The Alcotts” from Piano Sonata No. 2 continues the thoughtful and emotive delivery that rumbles quite a bit louder at the end with the firm strokes emitting a sublime energy.

“Kreisleriana”, by Schumann, exits the listen and is an intense and vibrant execution that can also find breezy places to reside, as well as dreamy bouts of beauty, where Chai’s fascinating manipulation of her instrument is just so admirable. This is Chai’s first time featuring work from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and let’s hope it isn’t her last, cause her unparalleled attention to detail and mesmerizing ability make for interpretations that warrant repeated listens. (score 9/10)

This solo piano recording from Divine Art is commendable for sterling performances but even more imaginative programming. On Songs of Love, Jenny Q Chai couples works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Robert Schumann with one by Charles Ives.

Based in both Shanghai and California and currently a piano faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, Chai shows herself to be a solid interpreter of works from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries on her fifty-one-minute recital. While her renderings of the Bach and Ives compositions are wholly engaged, Chai’s connection to Schumann’s is perhaps the strongest, not so much for musical reasons but a personal one: she was introduced to his music by her first teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, Seymour Lipkin, with whom she studied from twelve to nineteen. A dedicated Beethoven interpreter, he took her on as a student, despite having no openings in his schedule, and guided by him, she learned Schumann’s Kreisleriana when she was eighteen and performed it at her graduation recital. He also encouraged her to explore the music of contemporary composers, among them Elliot Carter and Henry Cowell.

Given that, as Chai herself opines, “Everything comes from Bach,” it’s apt that the album should begin with the “Aria” from Goldberg Variations. Her controlled, thoughtfully paced, and delicate treatment amplifies the poetic tenderness of the material, not to mention its timeless beauty and ruminative character. Chai then tackles “The Alcotts” from Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, a selection consistent with her choice of album dedicatee, Lipkin: as Ives’s piece opens with a quote of the beginning of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, “The Alcotts” pays further tribute to Chai’s former teacher. In its hushed, almost hymnal opening part, the 1921-published setting perpetuates the delicacy of the Bach setting; at the two-minute mark, however, the writing begins to reflect Ives’s idiosyncratic sensibility when hammering chords and flirtations with dissonance are followed by a lyrical episode that’s equally blues-tinged and salon music-flavoured. Unpredictable to the end, the material proves arresting for weaving many disparate strands into a nine-minute expression.

At album’s end, Schumann’s 1838 fantasy cycle Kreisleriana, Op.16 takes its name from musician and conductor Johannes Kreisler, a character created by German author E. T. A. Hoffmann. Structured in eight parts, the work follows the towering “Äusserst bewegt” movement with “Sehr innig und nicht zu rach,” whose swooning motif sings for ten enrapturing minutes. The movement’s hardly a one-dimensional exercise in repetition, however, as the theme’s subjected to multiple treatments, here voiced contemplatively and there swiftly. The work’s Romantic side rises to the surface for the rambunctious “Sehr aufgeregt,” playful “Sehr lebhaft,” and two “Sehr langsam” movements, one lyrical and the other stately. Chai’s technical facility is called upon by the challenging roller-coaster “Sehr rasch” before the work ends with the majestic “Schnell und spielend.” For those intent on doing so, there’s more than enough evidence to argue for the presence of Schumann’s “Florestan” and “Eusebius” personas in the work. Regardless, Lipkin would no doubt approve of what his one-time student has created in all three of the composers’ cases and be honoured by having been memorialized so fondly.

Intended as a tribute to pianist and pedagogue Seymour Lipkin (1927-2015) with whom Jenny Q Chai studied at the Curtis Institute, this album, Songs of Love (recorded December 18, 2020), invokes his guiding spirit and that of Beethoven, although the latter by way of allusion in the movement from Charles Ives’s 1920 “Concord” Sonata. The opening Aria from the Goldberg Variations, here fraught with ritards and pregnant pauses, stretches the contour of the piece to its limit, transforming the moment into a Romantic nocturne.

The music of Charles Ives (1874-1954) came to Chai by way of Seymour Lipkin, who encouraged explorations into contemporary composition. The “Concord” Sonata meant to convey the composer’s attraction to “the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts of over half a century ago” (from “Essays Before a Sonata,” 1920). Typical of Ives, “The Alcotts” demands a large degree of commitment from the interpreter, since Ives deliberately omits bar lines and invites harmonic clashes and ambiguity, all in the spirit of free improvisation. For Ives, the only “lasting” performance occurred within his own mind, responding to music and life spontaneously, with each new day. “The Alcotts” invokes images of father Bronson and daughter Louisa May in a “fateful” conversation; thus, the obsessive quote from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Do we also detect an ironical hint of the Mendelssohn Wedding March? The lyrical mood soon assumes more dire impulses, with the “fate” motif in striking and dissonant chords, antiphonally wrought. The father’s stentorian discourse or the daughter’s ferocious temper? The Beethoven quote softens, and we imagine that Ives invokes the image of the character Beth in Little Women at the keyboard, playing folk songs from Scotland for the family’s pleasure. Ives commented that his serene beginning section depicted the father Bronson in conversation with Concord Sheriff Sam Staples, who had Thoreau arrested for civil disobedience. The piety of the affect perhaps evolves from the sanctity of the domestic habitat, the “home fires.” Chai’s last full minute of performance resonates with mighty, sweeping chords and richly tender arpeggios that fade into a literary utopia.

Schumann’s phantasmagorical 1838 suite Kreisleriana appears to be Chai’s calling card, and she lavishes equally forceful, Florestan-inspired articulation in concert with her poetical musings, a la Eusebius, Schumann himself referred to the suite, influenced by his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann, as “intricate,” a labyrinth of juxtaposed, often confrontational impulses, an emotional response to Hoffmann’s unconventional, even revolutionary, approach to the novel form. Chai plays the opening movement with a ferocity that might characterize a meteoric Bach toccata. The dreamy, introspective second movement, meanders and colorfully drifts into passion, serene contemplation, and hints of lullaby. The third section invokes the epithet “wild” that Schumann often employed, especially considering that Hoffmann has a domestic cat’s writing for some of Kreisler’s memoirs in the novel. The
ascending and descending scales, in antiphon, create a Romantic haze, even a scrambling G-Minor gauze, that soars in its yearning quality. The four-voice harmonizations, richly endowed, nod their homage to Bach. The Sehr langsam fourth movement, already slow and pondering, almost bogs down in Chai’s molasses. More Bach contrapuntal stretto emerges in the ensuing Sehr lebhaft fifth movement, playful in a kind of parody of G-Minor variations that soon achieve a bravura character.

The sixth movement, Sehr langsam, truly demonstrates Schumann’s divided personality, moving through clear Bach impulses that possess chorale textures, into a brief, animated sequence that becomes once more subdued. Wild indeed, the Sehr rasch seventh movement poses a manic C Minor that injects elemental force from Bach and Beethoven. Just as suddenly, Chai intones a transcendent chorale sequence bearing little trace of the mortal storm preceding. The last movement, Schnell und spieland, quick and playful, opens with ostinato phrases over a drone bass, as though an eerie fairy tale were recited to the accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy. The mood shifts to deep tones once more, in the manner of a ballad, with jabbing offbeats. The subsequent syncopations add a demonic element to the otherwise light, cavorting gestures, as the music descends to a chthonian depth far away
from reality. A love song for Clara Schumann, yes, but with thorns and thistles.

Pianist Jenny Q Chai’s new album is a change of pace for the artist who is known for her performances of avant-garde and contemporary music. Songs of Love is intended as a tribute to her teacher/mentor Seymour Lipkin (1927-2015) who taught at the Curtis Institute. Lipkin’s core repertoire revolved around the early romantics and Bach. It is from those core composers that Chai has chosen this set of three pieces.

The album opens with an exquisite performance of the “Aria” from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV 988. The lyrical line here is caressed lovingly by Chai and it creates an almost meditative quality to the opening of this album. It is followed by the second movement from Ives’ Concord Sonata (1921). The work uses the rhythmic idea from Beethoven’s fifth symphony as a unifying device and has quotes of that opening motive to clarify this connection even further. What is telling in Chai’s performance is how the opening bars of the work seem to grow out of her interpretation of the Bach in terms of articulation. In the Ives too, she finds a way to bring out the lyrical aspects of this music that helps us hear the way Ives is looking back in time while also adding his own idiosyncratic touches. The beautiful second thematic area with its parlor qualities, is quite stunning. One can hope that perhaps Chai will tackle the whole sonata as her performance here is quite stunning.

Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16 took its inspiration from a character created by E.T.A. Hoffman. In the eight movements of this 1838 work, Schumann indulges his own fantasy in the wildly divergent characters from Hoffman’s work. The melodies are among some of the composer’s most engaging and it also features some of his finest piano writing. Chai’s connection to the work comes from it being one of her graduation recital pieces—a work she has performed and lived with for almost two decades now. Her performance is impassioned and shows off more of her technical virtuosity coupled with her fine sense of line and lyrical interpretation. It all sounds so effortless in her hands that it entrances the listener.

Divine Arts’ sound gives us a rich sound picture to enjoy Chai’s performance and further enhances her own pedal work and technical skill. While these are all quite familiar works, the combination here really helps provide a fine reminder of Chai’s interpretive skill in more familiar repertoire—something that can be overlooked in more contemporary works. The pacing of the album and general flow of the program also work beautifully in a release that comes highly recommended even at the short playing time.

Born in Shanghai and now enjoying a highly successful career in North America, the charismatic pianist Jenny Q Chai has devised a journey with composers from three centuries expressing their feelings towards love. Opening in Baroque rectitude with the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations and concluding in more recent times with music by Charles Ives, [the] greater part of the disc is given to a highly revealing performance of Schumann’s Kreisleriana, It has that required aristocratic distinction mixed with a feeling of spontaneity as Chai reveals the work’s full beauty coupled with much forceful brilliance.

20th Century romantic classical music and Chai’s skills come together her for a solo piano recital that’s illuminated with quiet fire and spirit that shows how cultural clichés are about to be smashed.  From China to you proving that music is the universal language, you can almost hear her wheels turning as sure as the notes she’s playing.  This is a true hot, new find.

What a strange title for a recital of three pieces that seem to have little relationship to love. As this Chinese-born pianist explains in considerable depth, it is dedicated to Seymour Lipkin, her teacher at the Curtis Institute, but it is stretching things a bit if we look for “love” in the traditional sense from the works themselves.

The first selection is the aria from the Goldberg Variations by Bach, here lavished with so much expression and lethargy I began to wonder if she would ever reach the theme’s closing bars. This is followed by III from the Ives Concord Sonata. Her rationale was that Lipkin was a Beethoven specialist, and this section extensively quotes the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony 5. The tempo, while hardly flowing, does work at a more acceptable pace.

Schumann’s  Kreisieriana is the major work here, and Jenny Q Chai shows her mastery in a sweeping performance that emphasizes all of the Florestan and Eusebius dual personalities of the music. It’s almost as an act of redemption the music comes alive and breathes a freshness few performances are able to capture. The pianist is on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, an alumni mentor at the Curtis Institute of Music, and an official career mentor at the Manhattan School of Music; but there is yet not a whiff of academia in her playing. Her Fazioli sounds forth with power and all the color one could wish for, and the notes are interesting. Buy this one for the great Schumann; the rest is superfluous.

Bach a leads off another Divine Art piano recital, this one featuring Jenny Q. Chai. Here Bach is offered along with one 19^th-century work and one from the 20^th. But the emphasis in this case is more strongly on a single work: Chai devotes 36 minutes of the CD’s total of 51 to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. The eight-movement suite, always highly expressive (and central to Schumann’s piano oeuvre) gets a passionate and involving reading here: Chai is very impressive in the way she contrasts the hard-driving passages with the delicate, quietly lyrical ones. This contrast is key not only to Kreisleriana but also to Schumann himself, with the Florestan and Eusebius characters that he believed, together, encompassed his personality.

In fact, a piano work focused on Johannes Kreisler, a brilliant but very mercurial imaginary conductor created by E.T.A. Hoffmann, seems perfect for Schumann – and Chai’s determination to explore the extreme contrasts of mood and approach in the work as a whole, and also within its movements, makes the totality of Kreisleriana come alive with a high level of expressiveness. Immediately before offering the Schumann, Chai plays The Alcotts, the third movement from Ives’ Concord Sonata. The sonata was designed by Ives to contain a significant component of each performer’s thinking: much of it has to be created as well as interpreted when it is played, and in the hands of many players (including Ives himself) it would sound different each time. On this particular CD, at this particular time, Chai makes The Alcotts a simple, genuine, rather straightforward movement expressing warmth, affection and a certain level of delicacy – a very strong contrast indeed to the Schumann heard afterwards. Even before the Ives, though, at the start of the disc, Chai delves into Bach, offering the basic Aria from the Goldberg Variations in a very slow, quiet, stretched-out version that contains far more emotional heft than it would on the harpsichord for which it was written – indeed, far more than a pianist with a focus on some level of historically informed performance would bring to it. Chai seems to see this Bach work as a curtain-raiser to scenes of strongly felt emotion, and while that is a thoroughly un-Bachian view of the music, it is undeniably effective for listeners who find themselves in tune, so to speak, with Chai’s thinking about all these works.