Pianist Charlotte Hu to Make PENTATONE Debut

Charlotte Hu on the cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

This Friday will see the release of Liszt: Metamorphosis, pianist Charlotte Hu’s debut album on PENTATONE. That title is a personal one, since the birth name of the Taiwanese-American pianist was Ching-Yun Hu. Thus, to some extent, the “metamorphosis” of her name may have led her to reflect on the progressive changes in Franz Liszt’s approaches to making music over the course of his career. As of this writing, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-ordering a digital download of the album’s ten tracks.

Ironically, Hu seems to have undermined her title by beginning with the latest of the selections from the Liszt catalog. This is “Les jeux d’eau á la Villa d’Este,” which is in the “Troisième année” volume in the Années de pèlerinage collection. This was composed in 1877 when Liszt was going into his late sixties. (He died in 1886.) The chronology then drops back to 1837 with four transcriptions of songs composed by Franz Schubert over a period of two years. These are followed by the transcription of Robert Schumann’s “Widmung” from 1848. The chronology then backs up again to account for the three concert études composed between 1845 and 1849, and the album concludes with the 1858 “Rhapsodie espagnole.”

In my younger years I had the advantage of a piano teacher with a sincere commitment to take Liszt’s piano music seriously. Through her I came to appreciate this difference between a performance that had something to say and mere showboating. As a result, I accumulated a relatively generous number of recordings of performances of that music, most of which offered valuable experiences that I would often revisit.

Whether or not this new recording will join the ranks of my collection remains to be seen. From a technical point of view, Hu definitely has the chops to take on the many challenges that arise in Liszt scores. However, I have not yet decided how she stands up in relation to the Liszt pianists I have encountered with satisfaction over the past few decades. (These being personal preferences, I am not going to run off any names!) Nevertheless, if plans arise to bring her to San Francisco, I definitely would like to know about them!