Jiarui Cheng / Piano

2025 Cliburn Competition

Preliminary Round (Live)
Bach · Saint-Saëns / Liszt · Brahms · Scriabin · Montero

Recorded live at the Preliminary Round of the Seventeenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Fort Worth, Texas: Bach, Saint-Saëns / Liszt, Brahms, Scriabin and Gabriela Montero’s commissioned Rachtime.

Released 24 May 2025 · Platoon

Listen on

(opens in a new tab)

Tracklist

1Bach — Toccata in C minor, BWV 91110:31
2Saint-Saëns / Liszt — Danse macabre, Op. 40 (S. 555)8:26
3Brahms — Intermezzo in A major, Op. 118 No. 26:08
4Scriabin — Piano Sonata No. 5 in F-sharp major, Op. 5310:33
5Montero — Rachtime4:47

About the work

Recorded live on 22 May 2025 at Van Cliburn Concert Hall at TCU, Fort Worth, Texas, during the Preliminary Round of the Seventeenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Each of the twenty-eight competitors gave a forty-minute recital that had to include the competition’s newly commissioned work; through the Cliburn’s partnership with Apple Music Classical and the label Platoon, the recitals were released as live albums within days of being played.

Bach’s seven keyboard toccatas belong to his early years — Henle places them between about 1707 and 1713 — and he never gathered them into a set. The C minor Toccata grows almost entirely from one idea: a bare line in the bass opens it, a four-voice Adagio follows, and a terse fugue subject then governs nearly everything that comes after. Midway the counterpoint thins to a single thread and the music seems to stop, only for the fugue to resume and drive, by way of a short Adagio and a closing Presto, to its end.

Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre began in 1872 as a song on a poem by Henri Cazalis and became a symphonic poem in 1874, with a solo violin tuned to sound the tritone, a xylophone for the rattling bones and the Dies irae recast as a waltz; Édouard Colonne conducted the premiere in Paris in January 1875. Liszt, whose own symphonic poems had shown Saint-Saëns the way, made his solo piano version in 1876. It is a free recomposition rather than a reduction: he enlarges the brief lyrical episode and heightens the macabre colour with the full range of his own keyboard writing.

Brahms wrote the Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, in the summer of 1893 at Ischl, sending them one by one in manuscript to Clara Schumann, to whom the set is dedicated; Simrock published it that December under the plain title Klavierstücke. The A major Intermezzo, marked Andante teneramente, is the most familiar of them. Its tender opening melody returns after a central section in F-sharp minor in which the tune is shadowed by a hidden canon in the left hand — intimate music that Philipp Spitta thought best heard slowly and alone.

Scriabin wrote the Fifth Sonata in Lausanne in December 1907, within days of completing The Poem of Ecstasy, whose text supplies the epigraph at the head of the score, and he regarded it as the best of his piano works. It is the first of his sonatas in a single movement, the plan he kept for the five that followed. A violent, trilling flourish from the depths and a languid, searching reply frame a fast sonata design; the chord built in fourths that defines his late music surfaces at its centre; and the closing bars restate the opening, so the piece breaks off rather than ends.

Rachtime was commissioned by the Cliburn from the Venezuelan-born pianist and composer Gabriela Montero, who also sat on the 2025 jury, and was heard for the first time across the three days of the Preliminary Round, where every competitor was required to play it. The title joins Rachmaninoff to ragtime. Montero, celebrated for improvising in classical idioms at her recitals, has said that the first complete draft took shape at the keyboard and was refined afterwards, and that she left the score sparingly marked so that each pianist’s own personality could come through.

Produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by Tom Lazarus; executive producer Jacques Marquis. ℗ 2025 Van Cliburn Competition, under exclusive license to Platoon Ltd.