Courage was not lacking at cellist Adam Liu's recital Wednesday night at Duquesne University. The Pittsburgh Symphony's assistant principal cellist played an emotionally intense and wide ranging program that included a world premiere.
He began alone with one of the peaks of cello repertoire -- Zoltan Kodaly's nearly half-hour-long Sonata for Solo Cello. Liu played with ferocious power and considerable finesse, though there were a handful of imperfections that weren't entirely surprising given this piece's fiendish demands on technique.
The world premiere was "Drinking Alone by Midnight," composed by the cellist's brother ChangYuan Liu and inspired by an ancient Chinese poem with the same title. The music began with pianist Becky Billock reaching into the piano to pluck strings in notes of the pentatonic scale, harmony that Western composers have long used to evoke Chinese moods. But the cool spaciousness that this composer created at the start was an excellent contrast with intensely singing lines he wrote for the cello in the main body of his piece.
The weakest performance came at the end in Ludwig van Beethoven's Sonata No. 3 for Cello and Piano. There were extended passages that were rewarding, especially in the first movement. But the Scherzo's middle section didn't soar and its ending was out of focus. The finale, too, was more a read-through than a well-defined interpretation.
