Karisa Chiu: Home
Cedille Records

A cursory scan of the works American violinist Karisa Chiu selected for her debut album might suggest choices made to showcase her versatility and the range of which she's capable. Yet while both boxes are indubitably checked by a recording that features material by Jean Sibelius, Claude Debussy, Augusta Read Thomas, Cyril Scott, and Gabriel Fauré, the selections hold deep personal meaning for her too. During her violin-playing father's senior year of college, he performed Sibelius's Five Pieces (1915–18) and Debussy's Violin Sonata (1916–17) with a pianist who would later become her mother. At the age of eighteen, Karisa enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music where she met and worked with its then composer-in-residence Thomas, hence the inclusion of the composer's Incantation. Having returned home to weather the pandemic storm, Chiu decided to channel her energies into learning a new piece and came upon an arrangement by Fritz Kreisler of Cyril Scott's Lotus Land. Two years later, she and her Korean mother returned to her home country and performed Faure's Violin Sonata No. 1 at a recital, and it too graces the release. All such connections align with the album title and the feelings and memories Home holds for the violinist. It's fitting also that it was recorded in her hometown of Chicago with her good friend from Curtis, Chinese pianist Zhu Wang, and has been issued by the Chicago-based Cedille Records.

An apt choice of opener, the Sibelius work eschews the grandiosity of his symphonic conceptions for material that's by comparison intimate and salon-like; it's easy to visualize the duet partners essaying its five pieces in a host's living room packed with friends and family, and Finnish folk influences regularly emerge to bolster that feeling. The opening “Mazurka” seduces quickly with sultry Polish dance moves and lilting rhythms, and Chiu serves immediate notice that she's a talent to be reckoned with when one romantic flourish follows another. A lively “Rondino” follows, its ebullient tone strengthened by the violinist's nimble bowing and her partner's complementary support, after which the duo beguiles with a heartfelt rendering of the composer's lovely “Valse.” The lyrical swoon of “Aubade” exudes a fittingly early morning aura (the name's derived from “aube” or dawn, after all) before “Menuetto” concludes the work on a dazzling note with expertly executed trills and singing melodies.

An air of tragedy shadows Debussy's three-part Violin Sonata, which he performed at his final public appearance. Compact at fourteen minutes, the work begins hauntingly, the gesture perhaps suggesting an intimation of death, but soon enough acquires momentum and vitality—even if hints of exhaustion and expiration also seep in. The music flits from one episode to another, much like someone whose thoughts are unmoored and hazily casting about. An animated central movement is dotted with exuberant staccato gestures and transporting lyrical expressions, after which the third emerges with a sprinkling of sparkle and virtuosic runs by Chiu. Restlessness permeates the volatile movement, however, as it shifts from contemplative passages to animated ones.

At the album's centre is Chiu's unaccompanied performance of Thomas's chant-inspired Incantation (1995), the violinist demonstrating her grasp of the work's essence in the patience with which she delivers the material, the precision of her articulation, and nuanced handling of dynamics. The album's other single-movement piece follows, namely Kreisler's 1922 arrangement of Scott's dreamy Lotus Land (1905). Inspired by Tennyson's 1832 setting “The Lotos-Eaters” (itself stemming from Homer's The Odyssey), the intoxicating work opens with a melody reminiscent of Gershwin's “My Man's Gone Now” before easing into its own sensual and enigmatic dreamscape. With Wang grounding the performance with hushed chords, Chiu floats tremulously above as if inhabiting some distant magical realm. Fauré's Violin Sonata No. 1 (1875–76) returns us to slightly more familiar ground with a piece that's classically structured but in no way emotionally constrained. Intense romantic outpourings flood the opulent opening movement in a way that suggests a Robert Schumann influence. Whereas the subdued, almost grief-stricken second opts for heartfelt melancholy and wistful yearning, the closing movements, marked “Scherzo: Allegro vivo” and “Finale: Allegro quasi presto,” range between spirited affirmation and introspective lyricism.

January 2026