Chopin competition winner Eric Lu plays with great tonal finesse and expressive patience

Not all piano competition winners are creatures of spectacle. America's Eric Lu, the 2025 Chopin Competition gold medallist, is an artist of great tonal finesse and expressive patience, as his previous performances here have demonstrated.

- Geoffrey Lim

This all-Chopin concert, presented by Altenburg Arts, was quite simply one of the most eloquent, absorbing solo recitals in recent memory.

As a pianist, the 27-year-old epitomises the idea of art as emotion recollected in tranquillity. There is nothing sensational about his style, and he may be the most resolutely measured artist to have won the Chopin since American Garrick Ohlsson in 1970.

Hearing Lu work his subtle magic over two hours of Chopin was a deeply satisfying experience: Hardly a single phrase felt belaboured or out of place, and complex musical ideas were distilled with such grace that, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Polixenes, the art itself was nature.

Only in his penultimate encore - the Op. 42 waltz, dispatched with dazzling and uncharacteristic abandon - did Lu play in a way that could be described as titillating. Elsewhere, the depth and meticulous understatement produced an effect at once as static and as luminous as a Georges Seurat painting.