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Pianist Bruce Liu instantly achieved widespread renown when he won the XVIII International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021. The win led to his signing with the Deutsche Grammophon label, which began releasing recordings of his performances during the competition. His r¨¦sum¨¦ of performances includes appearances not only with Canadian groups but also with a number of world-class ensembles outside Canada. Liu's growing recording catalog includes WAVES: Music by Satie (2024), on which he performs music by Satie on an upright piano as well as on a conventional concert grand.

Bruce Xiaoyu Liu (ÁõÏþÓí) was born to Chinese parents in Paris, France, on May 8, 1997. His family moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, when he was six, and two years later, he took up the piano. By the time he was 11, he was entering competitions, and soon, he was winning them both in Canada and beyond, including the Orchestre Symphonique de Montr¨¦al Standard Life Competition (2012), the Prix d'Europe (2015), and the Viseu International Piano Competition in Portugal (2019). Liu entered the piano class of Richard Raymond at the Montreal Conservatory of Music and then went on to the Universit¨¦ de Montr¨¦al. There, he studied with pianist Dong Thai Son, who in 1980 became the first Asian winner of the Chopin International Competition; he continued to study with Dong Thai Son in the early 2020s.

Even before his Chopin Piano Competition win, Liu had performed with a variety of major orchestral ensembles, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as a number of groups in Canada, and he made recordings for broadcast with the ICI Radio-Canada network. He toured the U.S. with the China National Center for the Performing Arts Orchestra. The Chopin Piano Competition prize brought Liu what he termed a marathon of further appearances and a contract with the Deutsche Grammophon label, which issued his prize-winning performances in 2021. Further releases featured Liu's work in other rounds of the competition. In 2023, Liu issued the album WAVES: Rameau, Ravel, Alkan, and in 2024, another album under the "WAVES" rubric, Music by Satie, appeared on Deutsche Grammophon. Both charismatic and disarmingly humble (he is fond of saying he is "not so good at piano"), Liu numbers among his hobbies auto racing. The same enthusiasm was pursued by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, a pianist Liu admires and in some respects resembles as an artist. ~ James Manheim

Fr¨¦d¨¦ric Chopin was the most famous composer of Polish origin in the history of Western concert music. He was a progressive who revolutionized the harmonic content, the texture, and the emotional quality of the small piano piece, turning light dance forms, nocturnes, and study genres into profound works that were both daring and deeply inward.

Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to a French father and a Polish mother, probably on March 1, 1810, he was a native of Zelazowa Wola village west of Warsaw. In these rustic surroundings, he was exposed to both the classics of keyboard music (including, significantly, those of Bach), by teachers who immediately recognized him as a prodigy, and to Polish folk music, which would be reflected in a pioneering musical nationalism. He quickly outstripped the talents of most of Warsaw's top piano and composition teachers, and when he graduated from the Main School of Music in 1829, professor J¨®zef Elsner pronounced him a genius. That year, Chopin set out on a tour of Austria, Germany, and France. During this period, he wrote his two piano concertos, which contain much of the typical brilliant style of virtuoso piano music of the era, but show the development of a gift for distinctive melody, both ornate and emotionally deep. Chopin returned to Warsaw but departed again, first for Vienna, where he heard news that Poland's uprising against its Russian, Prussian, and Austrian rulers had failed. The Polish national spirit would pervade some of his larger works, including the so-called "Revolutionary" Etude (the Etude in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12). He was encouraged by composer Robert Schumann, who reviewed his Variations, Op. 2, with the words "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!"

In 1832, Chopin headed for Paris, in many ways the center of European cultural life, and dazzled the city's musical elite, including Franz Liszt, in a concert at the Salle Pleyel. He immediately found himself in demand as a piano teacher, and soon he decided to settle in Paris, although he always hoped to return to Poland. He performed at aristocratic salons, cultivating then-new genres such as the ¨¦tude (the word means "study," but in Chopin's hands it became much more), the nocturne, the waltz, and, in a Polish vein, the mazurka and the polonaise. After a planned marriage to a Polish girl, Maria Wodzinska, fell through, Chopin met writer Aurore Dudevant, who used the pen name George Sand. The pair began a torrid affair (Sand was married) and traveled together in 1838 to Mallorca, Spain, where they found the local citizenry disapproving of their unconventional relationship and were forced to lodge in a disused monastery. Chopin's creativity was fired, and he would write brilliantly innovative sets of piano music over the next few years. However, the weather turned cold in the winter of 1838-1839, and Chopin's health worsened as he and Sand lived in the unheated building; he was probably already suffering from tuberculosis. Back in France, Chopin and Sand took up residence in Paris and in summers at her estate in Nohant, where Chopin composed prolifically and the couple hosted painter Eug¨¨ne Delacroix and other members of the cream of French artistic society. The romance cooled, though, and finally ended in 1847. One factor precipitating the breakup was Sand's negative portrayal of Chopin in her 1846 novel Lucrezia Floriani.

Chopin's health was also worsening badly; he found it difficult to perform and could no longer attract crowds as a virtuoso. During political unrest in Paris in 1848, Chopin fled to the British Isles. He performed in London (once for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) and in Glasgow, where he was the subject of romantic interest from Scots noblewoman Jane Stirling. Chopin, however, remarked that he was "closer to the grave than the nuptial bed," and indeed in November of 1848 he gave what would be his last concert, for Polish refugees. He returned to Paris and continued to receive a steady stream of admirers despite what was clearly a terminal illness; singer Pauline Viardot, according to historians Kornel Micha?owski and Jim Samson, remarked that "all the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to faint in his room." Chopin died in Paris on October 17, 1849. ~ James Manheim