Liyuan Liu, Lan Cui

Many composers have used their first attempts at chamber music as a way of perfecting their technique before tackling orchestral composition. Chinese composer Zhuang Liu’s earliest compositions were two chamber works written while she was still a student in Shanghai. The first of these was the neo-Romantic and lyrically expressive Romance. Chamber music also occupies a special place in the instrumental oeuvre of Johannes Brahms, who composed motivically economical and formally fluid works of profound depth for a variety of ensembles. With these two viola sonatas (transcriptions of his clarinet sonatas), he took this approach to its extreme, while the Scherzo from the F-A-E Sonata, a work written collaboratively with Robert Schumann and the latter’s pupil Albert Dietrich, is one of the young Brahms’s earliest attempts at this musical form. The programme will be performed by two internationally active Chinese musicians. Viola player Liyuan Liu studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Juilliard School and Columbia University in New York, winning the International Concerto Competition in the latter city in 2011. She is currently employed at the Zhejiang Conservatory of Music in Hangzhou as assistant director of the orchestral department and associate professor of viola. Pianist Cui Lan studied at the Royal Conservatory Antwerp, the Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo and won numerous prizes in Belgium and France. Since 2008 she has taught chamber music and art song at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.