Das Lebewohl

Recorded at the age of thirty, pianist Jiaxin Min’s debut album is built entirely around the idea of farewell — a theme drawn directly from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a, whose title she insists on calling by its original German, Das Lebewohl (“Farewell”), rather than the more familiar French Les Adieux. Written for his close friend Archduke Rudolph, the sonata’s three movements — farewell, absence, reunion — trace Beethoven’s own shift from middle-period intensity to late-period introspection, and became the emotional anchor around which Min built the rest of the program: Liszt’s stormy, death-haunted Ballade No. 2, and Barber’s jazz-inflected Piano Sonata, Op. 26, both pieces she first studied as a teenager.

In an unusually candid personal essay, Min traces her own long detour away from and back to the piano — years of competition, study abroad, and eventual doubt that nearly led her to abandon music altogether, followed by a period of real absence that taught her, as she puts it, that “we can never truly say farewell.” Recorded at Flagey’s Studio 4 in Brussels, the album becomes a genuine reunion: between repertoire studied decades apart, and between the pianist and the younger self she never actually left behind.

Jiaxin Min, piano