She's got rhythm | Bangkok Post: lifestyle

CLASSICAL

Is there any kind of music that is out of bounds for the American pianist Jenny Lin's stylistic perfect pitch? Her range seems limitless with each new recording revealing a new facet of her musical personality. To date her repertoire on disc ranges from Schumann and Liszt through Mompou, the early Soviet experimentalists, and Ruth Crawford Seeger to modernists as diverse as John Cage and Valentin Silvestrov. A high point is one of the finest of the many recordings of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes And Fugues.

GET HAPPY: Virtuoso Showtunes For Piano. Jenny Lin, piano. Steinway & Sons, CD or download

Now we have yet another departure, a programme of 19 showtune transcriptions that follow the music's invitations to swing, romp, or turn reflective in a way that may remind listeners of Earl Wild's accounts of his own Gershwin transcriptions. In fact, three of the four Gershwin items on the programme are Wild's transcriptions, and they have nothing to fear in comparison with Wild's own recorded accounts. Listen to how she dispatches the elaborate filigree and high-speed passagework that Wild weaves around I Got Rhythm without letting them oversaturate the music and compromising its wit. The other "rhythm" number, Fascinating Rhythm shows off Lin's jaw-dropping virtuosity as being every bit as dazzling as Wild's.