An exciting career ahead

MANUS CAREY listens to Chinese pianist Wu Qian

Throughout her varied programme at the Purcell room on 19 May 2004, twenty-year-old London-based Chinese pianist Wu Qian demonstrated an impressive technical flair, an easy virtuosity and a warm sound coupled with a wonderful sensitivity to phrasing. Wu Qian is still a student at the Royal Academy of Music, having studied on a scholarship at the Menuhin school and earlier at her native Shanghai Conservatoire of Music. Still only young, she has already racked up numerous experiences performing in many leading venues both in London and abroad, and on the basis of her recent recital at the Purcell room it is not hard to see why.

The opening work, Bach's Partita in E minor (BWV 830), showed Wu Qian unafraid to interpret Bach using the full resources of the modern grand piano. Not to everyone's taste, this was full-bodied, muscular Bach with a romantic and dramatic edge, which in another pianist's hands might have become overblown. Her continuously beautiful and natural sense of phrasing shone particularly in the faster Courante, Gavotte and Gigue where rhythmic impetus made them sparkle and dance.

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