The Richter Scale is a new piano composition by German composer Boris Bergmann. The hour-long work was created for Steinway's Spirio | r, respected as the world's finest high resolution player piano and receives a stupendous performance on this premiere CD by the young Chinese Steinway Artist Ji Liu.
The Richter Scale is a programmatic composition in 11 movements inspired by Charles F. Richter's scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes. The Richter Scale premiered in concert at Steinway Hall London in November in 2019 and was recorded at Steinway Shanghai in September 2021. Over the past year the young London-based Chinese pianist Ji Liu has performed the piece at major concert venues throughout China.
The Richter Scale engages with the theme of subterranean seismic eruption as a broader reflection of cultural and emotional states of trauma, upheaval and resolution. Particularly in our post-pandemic global environment, the work serves as a metaphoric meditation on the environmental, geopolitical, medical, cultural and social cataclysms gripping and transforming the world today.
