Han Chen first appeared on my reviewer radar when he won the China International Piano Competition back in 2013, not to mention his reputation on the new music scene as both pianist and composer. He’s one of the few pianists who handles both gnarly contemporary scores and over-the-top Romantic showpieces with equal authority and style, as his stunning Liszt opera transcriptions (3/16) and survey of Thomas Adès’s piano works bear out. So it’s no surprise that he surmounts the sophisticated rhythmic challenges of Ligeti’s Études to a T, while infusing them with plenty of tonal allure and personality. He also makes it easier to take in the corpus as a whole entity by bracketing the relatively sparser Book 3 Études and two 1947 Capriccios with Book 1 at the start and Book 2 at the end.

Most musicians start ‘Désordre’ at an optimistic clip, only to get slower and heavier as the piece unfolds. Chen, however, aims for clarity and balance over sheer speed, yielding steadier results and more cogent interplay between the hands. Within the gorgeous expanding and contracting textures of ‘Cordes à vide’, Han makes expressive points through voicing and hand balance alone. If the ‘choked’ lines of ‘Touches bloquées’ don’t quite match the spring in Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s step, one must acknowledge Chen’s meticulous and consistent détaché/sostenuto differentiation throughout ‘Fanfares’. Perhaps the fact that Chen composes has something to do with the harmonic awareness informing his assiduous dynamic game plan in ‘Arc-en-ciel’ and the sculpted shimmer of ‘Automne à Varsovie’.

Following a fluid and well-paced ‘White on White’, Chen sustains the long opening section of ‘Pour Irina’ via subtle gradations of touch and timbre, while the pianist’s unanimity between the hands in the pianissimo coda definitively demonstrates the word ‘together’. My observations about Chen in Book 1 largely apply to Book 2’s corresponding characteristics, from the coiled bounce of the double notes in ‘Fém’ to the uncommon vertical clarity within the thick chords of the concluding companion études, ‘Coloana infinită’ and ‘Coloana fără sfârşit'. He patiently spins out the shifting rhythmic patterns of ‘Entrelacs’ as if the keyboard were an expansive and seamless canvas. In ‘Der Zauberlehrling’ (possibly the cycle’s creative apex), Chen easily survives the composer’s prestissimo, staccatissimo and leggierissimo challenge with not one note falling under the table. Granted, his interpretation is not as playful or audacious as Yuja Wang’s, but whose is? In short, Han Chen’s Ligeti Études easily hold their own in the company of Fredrik Ullén, Danny Driver and, of course, the aforementioned Aimard.