Des Moines Fans Cheer the Return of "Masterful" Frederic Chiu

BUENA PARK, CA (April 15, 2005) — When Yamaha Artist Frederic Chiu's third appearance in Des Moines was announced, The Art Center’s Levitt Auditorium sold out weeks in advance of the February performance. According to The Des Moines Register’s Music Critic Bruce Carr, Chiu’s performance thoroughly fulfilled the eager anticipation.

Yamaha Artist Frederic Chiu

Carr recounted a “convincing and compelling” recital in which Chiu “never broke a sweat” and rewarded his cheering fans, composed of what’s surely “Des Moines' most cosmopolitan audience” with two encores.

Citing Chiu's “complete command of the pianoforte's massive technical and expressive possibilities,” Carr stated that Chiu shared that mastery with his audience in an artfully constructed program devoted to Chopin (the Berceuse, the Barcarolle, four Mazurkas and six of the Op. 25 Etudes), Debussy (two of the six Images) and Ravel (two of the four Miroirs and the Gaspard de la Nuit).

Carr appreciated Chiu’s ability to speak “comfortably and engagingly with his audience,” citing the pianist’s “quick explanation of the unifying pianistic themes he hoped we would observe through the evening's many varied pieces: wonderfully difficult virtuosity, nationalistic nostalgia, and pictorial and auditory illusion.”

This ease with the spoken word was also highlighted in the recital's Impressionist second half, where Carr noted that Chiu greatly enhanced the audience’s understanding of the "Gaspard" by reading aloud each of the three early-Romantic poems that inspired each of the work’s three movements.

”If the most astonishing thing about Chiu's performance is his dexterity in managing fistfuls of notes, the most riveting is his constant, intense mental concentration… just close attention to the keyboard as if he were inventing the music on the spot,” raved Carr. “This is not your great-grandmama's drawing-room Chopin!”

For more information, write Yamaha Corporation of America, Piano Division, P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622, telephone (714) 522-9011, e-mail infostation@yamaha.com.