Claire Huangci: The Sleeping Beauty VINYL - Plak

ENGLISH

<br><br>Debut with lust for life and soulful feelings <br /> <br /> Russian repertoire suits her very well at the moment, because she has a very personal approach to it, concludes Claire Huangci. Not just because of the virtuosic vigour that the dainty pianist brings to her playing, but because of the wealth of images and emotions. Concertgoers who have seen the young Chinese-American perform live will understand at once. It is simply that she has a special energy, powerful and yet flexible, with which she can give intelligent context and nimble form to the smallest detail or fling wonderful arches across time and space. No surprise, then, that she decided on "Sleeping Beauty" as the title of her CD debut with music by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev: the selections from the ballets Sleeping Beauty and Romeo and Juliet admirably capture the youthful freshness of a pianist in her early twenties. Little character pieces recount the story of the two ballets; magical images and great passions unfold side by side. This is piano literature for the virtuoso, but that is by the way. Claire Huangci simply loves painting these miniatures with her palette of colours, the original orchestra sound always present in her ears. Most of her listeners will know some of the tunes – and yet through Claire's interpretation they will discover them anew.<br /> A discovery – as is Claire Huangci herself. She revealed her talent at an early age, starting at nine years of age as she meant to go on, with scholarships, concerts and competition prizes, playing a private concert for Bill Clinton when she was ten. All the same, she was never the typical wunderkind, developing freely of her own accord and only in her late teens feeling herself truly called to the pianist's vocation. After studying at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the seventeen-year-old decided to go to Germany on her own. Having got to know Arie Vardi at a competition, she was fascinated by the way he made music, in which the focus is less on technical challenges and more on overall aspects such as phrasing and tone. She took the opportunity to deepen her understanding in studies with him. She now lives and studies in Hanover, giving regular concerts at home and abroad. The present CD is more than a debut, which – like all debuts – holds a promise. It is a first valid statement, destined to endure.