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Pianist
Bruce Liu instantly achieved widespread renown when he won the XVIII International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021. The win led to his signing with the Deutsche Grammophon label, which began releasing recordings of his performances during the competition.
Bruce Xiaoyu Liu (
刘晓禹) was born to Chinese parents in Paris, France, on May 8, 1997. His family moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, when he was six, and two years later, he took up the piano. By the time he was 11, he was entering competitions, and soon, he was winning them both in Canada and beyond, including the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal Standard Life Competition (2012), the Prix d'Europe (2015), and the Viseu International Piano Competition in Portugal (2019).
Liu entered the piano class of Richard Raymond at the Montreal Conservatory of Music and then went on to the Université de Montréal. There, he studied with pianist
Dong Thai Son, who in 1980 had become the first Asian winner of the Chopin International Competition; he continued to study with
Dong Thai Son in the early 2020s.
Even before his Chopin Piano Competition win,
Liu had performed with a variety of major orchestral ensembles, including the
Cleveland Orchestra, the
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and the
Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as a number of groups in Canada, and he made recordings for broadcast with the ICI Radio-Canada network. He toured the U.S. with the China National Center for the Performing Arts Orchestra. The Chopin Piano Competition prize brought
Liu what he termed a marathon of further appearances and a contract with the Deutsche Grammophon label, which issued his
prize-winning performances in 2021. The label announced plans for further issues featuring
Liu's work in other rounds of the competition. Both charismatic and disarmingly humble (he is fond of saying he is "not so good at piano"),
Liu numbers among his hobbies auto racing. The same enthusiasm was pursued by
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, a pianist
Liu admires and in some respects resembles as an artist. ~ James Manheim