Shop Now

The Chronicle Review Corner

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.