Pianist Mike Cheng-Yu Lee performed on a piano made in 1825 at the Jacobs School of Music’s faculty recital Monday in Ford-Crawford Hall.
The polished surface of the piano showed the reflection of Lee’s hands on the keys as he played.
“I am looking forward to sharing this music and this instrument with IU,” Lee said.
Lee is a visiting assistant professor at the music school. Originally from New Zealand, Lee has studied at Yale and Cornell, and has worked as a lecturer of music theory at Yale.
Lee has worked with musicians like Joseph Lin from the Juilliard String Quartet, Clancy Newman from the Weiss-Kaplan-Newman Trio and violinist Tatiana Samouil to combine modern and period instruments into musical performance.
Viennese builder Wilhelm Leschen made the piano Lee played at the recital.
Cornell professor Malcolm Bilson loaned him the piano, and the recital was the first time it has been performed at IU, Lee said.
When the piano was found in Europe, it was in bad condition, forte piano player and adjunct lecturer Ji Young Kim said. Kim is Lee’s wife.
“A lot of people have worked very hard to restore this piano,” Kim said. “It’s a very special piano, I think, even among other pianofortes of its time.”
The recital’s repertoire included “Sonata in A Minor” by Franz Schubert, “Papillons, Op. 2” by Robert Schumann and “Sonata in A Major, Op. 101” by Ludwig van Beethoven.
The pieces in the concert are contemporary to the time when Leschen’s piano was made, Lee said.
“I chose the pieces because they showcase what this instrument can do,” Lee said. “One of the main purposes of this concert is to show the difference between older pianos and modern pianos.”
The piano has a different timbre and balance than other pianos, and it adds more clarity to the classical pieces, Lee said.
Leschen’s piano offers a transparent, articulate sound, Kim said. She is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Cornell University where she studies and performs 18th and 19th century music.
Kim will perform on Leschen’s piano at her faculty lecture and recital at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Ford-Crawford Hall. She will also speak about 19th century piano technology and the piano writing of Jan Ladislav Dussek.
The small concert hall was a fitting space for the antique piano, Kim said.
Lee is currently working on projects like “Beethoven Perspectives,” which is a series of lectures and recitals that examine the ties between Beethoven’s work and music by other composers. He is also working on a project involving the full cycle of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano sonatas.
According to his website, Lee’s piano performances portray “integrity, purity, complexity and truth ... with balance and control that are breathtaking.”
Kim said Lee’s music creates a story from a string of individual moments.
“There’s a very intense listening experience,” she said. “There’s a very vivid conception of what the music is about.”
Audience member Eunji Kim, a graduate student studying early music, said she enjoyed Lee’s performance.
“I like his musical touch,” she said. “His playing is like singing.”
