"This huge and eclectic program was one of the best opening gala performances I've seen recently... pianist Chung, who can play like fire looked lethal in a black evening dress."

The major work of composer György Ligeti's later years has been a brilliant series of piano etudes, virtuosic showpieces that combine the models of Debussy and Chopin with a range of contemporary references. They require a pianist of rare stamina and technique, and Lucille Chung is just such a pianist.
Chung's renditions of seven of these pieces -- three selections from Book2 and all four of the components of Book 3 -- formed the dazzling and all-too-brief high point of an otherwise hit-or-miss program presented Monday night by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.
Chung has made a specialty of this repertoire -- she's recorded all three books of the Etudes on the Dynamic label -- and her appearance at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum was a bravura display of extroversion and sensitivity.
Like his predecessors, Ligeti uses the etude as a way of exploring the relationship between technical means and expressive ends. The pieces are enormously difficult to play: in some cases because there are so many notes, in others because there are so few.
Yet each etude uses its particular technical challenges to create a distinctive world of mood and sonic imagery, and Chung's precise and crisply etched renditions conjured up each one vividly.

“Chung and Bax play memorably as one. Throughout, Lucille Chung reveals her exceptional technical ability and the depths of her musical understanding. The performance is a tour de force and highly recommended.”

“I love this pianist’s clear yet buttery approach to this music- it makes these formidable pieces seem both inviting and irresistible, as well as intellectually and technically rigorous. The wonderful early four-hands pieces are played with appropriate spirit. The later two-piano pieces (1976) are more familiar Ligeti. Chung and Bax give involved performances in nicely detailed sound. “

“Lucille Chung is obviously a young lady of no ordinary talent. She has bravely chosen to record the piano works of György Ligeti and therefore treads directly into the territory of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, that composer’s interpreter par excellence. Aimard’s fairly recent accounts of Ligeti at the Wigmore Hall (October last year,) still ring in the ears - they made an extraordinary impression. It takes a special sort of bravery, there is no other word for it, to tackle these scores head-on. The very sight of the printed page will scare most off. To interpret them with musicality and intelligence, as Lucille Chung has done, is no small achievement.
Chung’s strengths lie in the creation of the beautiful in sound, so the second Etude, ‘Cordes à vide’, is a crystalline drawing. ‘Touches bloquées’ is the most impressive of the set, however, a Ligeti playful Scherzo if ever there was one. Similarly the obsessive scalic fragments against legato chordal figures of ‘Fanfares’ is great fun. The fanfares are recognisable. You can almost hear Chung thinking ‘horns!’ as she plays.
Chung responds well to the varied demands of the four Etudes from Book 3 here. The slow-moving, hyper-beautiful ‘White on White’ (1995) is really lovely, ending like a music-box winding down. The more martellato ‘Pour Irina’ (composed for Darmstadt, so perhaps the ‘harder’ exterior should be unsurprising) reveals Chung’s finger-strength.
Highly recommended, then. Do try to hear the smaller pieces at least once as they afford much delight, but it is the Etudes that provide the main course, and very filling they are, too. “

This completes Lucille Chung’s survey for the Dynamic label of the complete Etudes of György Ligeti, the three books of which comprise 18 pieces (the first disc, CDS358, containing the second book of Etudes, the Musica Ricercata and three very short pieces, was issued in 2001). In my humble opinion, Ligeti’s Etudes constitute the most important music for solo piano written in the last quarter of a century, a staggering addition to the repertory, and declaring the composer to be in the very front rank of today’s creative artists.
Chung much impressed me at her Wigmore Hall début in London in September 2001, in music ranging from Beethoven’s rare Süssmayr Variations to Prokofiev’s Second Sonata and the Liszt Sonata- plus a selection from Ligeti’s Etudes. It was clear then that this young Canadian pianist is more than gifted, a judgment borne out by her Ligeti recordings, and on this latest one she is joined by an outstanding young Italian, the 2000 Leeds Piano Competition First Prize winner Alessio Bax, in Ligeti’s music for two pianists. These latter works comprise the Drei Stücke for two pianos and Fünf Stücke (the five being ‘Induló’, Polifón etüd’, ‘Három lakodalmi tánc’, the Sonatina’ and tiny ‘Allegro’) for piano duet.
In the two books (1 and 3) of Etudes Chung is quite remarkable: technically, for this music she has no peer; her clarity, musical taste and command of Ligeti’s varying moods are most impressive. These ideal performances are prefaced on this disc by the music for two pianists, and one has to say that whoever put these players together knew what he or she was doing. I am sure that Ligeti himself was thrilled to hear their realization of his relatively more elliptical works- a fine present for his eightieth birthday celebrations, captured for all time in splendid sound. The Naxos disc of Books 1 and 2 from Idil Biret is very good indeed, but I am in little doubt that Chung has the comparative edge.
The music is brilliant throughout: moving, amusing, outstandingly well imagined and realized in keyboard terms: who wouldn’t want to sample pieces called ‘White on White’, “Autumn in Warsaw’, ‘Self-portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin is also there)’, alongside such compellingly concentrated pieces as the ‘Sonatina’ for piano duet? This is an important record, excellently produced and strongly recommended.

So far as I am concerned, Ligeti’s Etudes constitute the most important contribution to solo piano music of the last quarter of a century, music of such range and imaginative power as to ensure the composer’s acceptance as an immensely important figure in world music.
In Lucille Chung, he has found an ideal interpreter. Readers may recall the enthusiastic notice I gave this pianist for her Wigmore Hall debut in September 2001, a programme which included a selection of Ligeti’s Etudes. On these discs we can recall them at will. Her playing is splendid for these works, and it is very good that Alessio Bax- the young Italian First Prize-winner at the Leeds Piano Competition in 2000- joins her in the music for two pianists, both for two pianos and for four hands at one piano. As a team, they are excellent. The music is eminently worthwhile and the recording is very good.

Ligeti’s Etudes are the outstanding piano works of the past two decades- dazzling pieces in the lineage of Chopin and Debussy, yet exploiting keyboard virtuosity with utter individuality. They are instant classics. Anyone playing them needs to stand comparison with the authoritative accounts recorded for Sony’s Ligeti Edition by Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Lucille Chung’s brilliant, crystalline performances are certainly very impressive indeed. The jazzy rhythms of “Fém” (Hungarian for “metal”), the dizzying Escher-like scales of “Vertige”, the rapid mechanical ostinato of “Der Zauberlehrling” (a piece study inspired by the player-piano music of Conlon Nancarrow) – all these are quite superbly rendered. So, too, are the older pieces included here, written while Ligeti was still living in Hungary, “Musica Ricercata” is a sort of elaborate counting-game, with each successive piece using one more note than the last. Some of its numbers resurfaced in Ligeti’s Bagatelles for wind quintet; and one of them was pretentiously used in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Chung is fully responsive to the music’s wit , rhythmic élan and expressive depth.
Those who already have Aimard’s recording would benefit from hearing Chung