Aristo Sham played a spectacular recital for the La Jolla Music Society Sunday at The Conrad. Gold Medal and Audience Award winner at the 2025 Van Cliburn International Competition, Sham displayed the technical brilliance we expect of a competition winner.
Sham’s program was comprised of his own version the Three B’s: Bach, Brahms and Busoni.
It is hardly surprising that a Van Cliburn Competition winner would be attracted to the music of Ferruccio Busoni, one of the greatest concert pianists from the turn of the 20th century. A prodigy whose parents launched his professional performing career at age seven, Busoni proved equally skilled as a composer, although today he is largely remembered for his transcendent transcriptions of the music by other composers, especially J.S. Bach.
On his recital’s first half, Sham offered two Busoni transcriptions as well as the composer’s Variations on Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor, BV 213.
Bach’s monumental Chaconne in D Minor, BWV 1004, the final movement of his Partita No. 2 in C Minor for Solo Violin, is not just a staple of the violin recital repertory. It has been frequently arranged for other instruments, and Busoni’s piano transcription of the Chaconne is nonpareil. Sham accorded the Chaconne’s opening cantus firmus its stately character and maintained laudable focus as he launched into its intricate elaborations and roaring left-hand octaves. I thought Sham’s approach to this daunting late Romantic reinvention of a Baroque masterpiece elegantly balanced both sides of the equation.
As an organist, I have always played and admired the twelve chorale preludes of Brahms’ Op. 112, but I was unaware that Busoni had made piano transcriptions of six chorales from this collection until Sham played them on this recital. Busoni’s structural transformation of the chorale preludes from organ to piano is less radical than his transcription of the Bach Chaconne because Brahms had already infused his chorale preludes with the rich, late Romantic keyboard harmonies of his many solo piano pieces.
Sham gave the chorale prelude “Herzlich tut mich verlangen” the gentle lyricism of a piano bagatelle and the Christmas chorale “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen” the warmth of a lullaby. In the set’s final chorale prelude “O Welt, ich muss dich lassen,” Sham communicated the composer’s existential resignation, inasmuch as this was the composer’s final composition.
Sham’s two Busoni transcriptions provided an adroit transition to Busoni’s own Variations and Fugue on Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor, BV 213. This is a prelude that most piano students learn, and Busoni wrote his first draft of Chopin Variations when he was a teen-ager. He revised this piece at various times in his career, and the six variations of the version Sham selected displayed Busoni’s most imaginative elaborations, which he played with the flair of a well-planned improvisation.
After intermission, Sham shifted his focus to Brahms, playing a set of six contrasting capriccios and intermezzi, ending the recital with Sonata No. 1 in C Major, Op.1. I was impressed with his fiery account of the Capriccio in F-sharp Minor, Op. 76, No. 1, and with his glowing cantabile theme of the Capriccio in G Minor, Op. 116, No. 3. Although Sham followed the composer’s detailed dynamics of the ingratiating A Major Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2, the composer marked his piece “Andante teneramente,” and I sensed a lack of tenderness in Sham’s interpretation.
Sham’s fleet, polished account of Brahms’ First Piano Sonata certainly confirmed his technical prowess. But placing Brahms’ earliest work immediately after hearing a set of the composer’s probing late works compromised the recital’s emotional arc.
Sham’s encore was an arrangement of “Embraceable You” from the Great American Songbook.
This recital was presented by the La Jolla Music Society on April 19, 2026, at The Conrad in downtown La Jolla.