Brighton Year-Round 2025
Gema Lu Cai Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Gema Lu Cai
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
This is an exciting debut. In months that have seen several here at St Nicholas. Gems Lu Cai brings Chaminade. Haydn, Copland and Ravel in a programme built round a set of variations.
Spellbinding and special.
Review
This is an exciting debut. In months that have seen several here at St Nicholas. Gems Lu Cai brings Chaminade. Haydn, Copland and Ravel in a programme built round a set of variations.
Gema Lu Cai is a Spanish Chinese pianist, multiple prize-winner from 2017-19 and a top graduate at the Royal Northern College Manchester (RNCM). She now teaches the Leeds Conservatoire and has her own studio. A Lucy Hale RNCM prize enabled her to own a Yamaha sponsored piano.
The Chaminade is one of her standouts: Etude de Concert No.,2 ‘Autumne’ from her Op 35 set.. it’s a work with deceptive simplicity and an almost classical Andante opening giving on to a remarkable and memorable contrast of autumn storms in its central section. Lu Cai plays with terrific aplomb. She allows the underlying ruffle under the storm to register and explodes with a diamond in pane exactitude in the storm sequence. It’s full of surge but also a precise marshalling of forces.
Haydn’s Piano Sonata No 60 in C Hob Vi/50 is his final work in this genre. It was a favourite of Sviatoslav Richter’s for one. Here Lu Cai is at home in the bright assertively genial dynamics of the opening Allegro. The surprises and ounces as Haydn un-blands any white radiance in C major with harmonic instability is thrilling. The brief swept figures and bound notes are like spuds to development.
The Adagio is gentler and more andante than adagios can be, a point of rest but also harmonic slipstreams that ripple from their rest. The concluding Allegro molto is handled at volume, pace and without a false classical delicacy. Haydn’s music us vibrant, groundbreaking and always surprising the listener. Lu Cai restores the springs to Haydn. You’d not think it was her first performance of the work, as she engagingly confided afterwards.
Copland’s Variations from 1930 are a natural follow on from that classical groundbreaking. Though tonal, the power of Copland’s expressive range with it’s single held chords and flowering register is still thrillingly modernist and owes little to the cuddlier impression of nod period Copland ballets.
Accelerating from their monodic cells, the variations gradually enrich harmonically as they proceed, but never lose their Bartokian barbarism – the nearest kinship from the time. As the theme is worked with contrapuntal clangour to build to a savage grandeur, then fines down to a mystical spareness not out of place in Scriabin but pure Copland, you feel this is an essential work that has to be written and should be heard so much more often. For that reason, and for Lu Cai’s impassioned yet utterly lucid account, which concludes with more acceleration from spareness to an organ-like paean to conclude, this might be the gem of this recital. Lu Cai adores playing it and you can tell.
Those organ sonorities might not be too far off what Copland was thinking. Copland’s Variations follow interestingly from his Organ Symphony, of which its conductor Walter Damrosch commented: “If a man can write music like this at 25, he’ll be ready to commit murder at 30.” Written as Copland neared 30, perhaps the Variations inspires similar sentiments. “Play it like a psychopath” Lu Cai’s tutor told her. She has played it, many times. But psychopath?
Ravel’s 150th anniversary was prompt to play his pristine early 1903 Sonatine M 40. It was the sole entrant for a competition to compose a Sonatine. It was judged too long by a few bars! The mean-ferruled judges should have reflected that they are now remembered solely for instigating and rejecting a masterpiece.
Classical, light. Without the dark attending Ravels mid-period piano music just ahead, the Sonatine moves with the tonal reach of his slightly later La Mere d’Oye, a consolatory warmth almost invoking childhood. The first movement is both delicate and playful.
The slow movement prophesises those memorial pieces to Haydn, Chabrier and Borodin Ravel later wrote. There’s charm and a sweetness without bitters here. In the repeated ABA form the themes seem variations of the original.
The finale – Ravel usually has trouble with them, but not here – is a bubbling moto perpetuo with wisps of the first movement entwined with the slow, all heltering along at a rate like a fantastically demented toybox. Lu Cai proves herself wholly attuned to Ravel’s idiom – as her Chaminade and for the Sonatine’s classicism, Haydn – would suggest. Lu Cai’s palette here sparkles with brightness, just as her colouring of the Copland darkened into rich primaries. Here the tonal brightness is as light and delicious as a Watteau scene. The lightness of the Rococo, thoroughly reworked into late romanticism at its most luminous. Spellbinding and special.
