Notes from a solitary pianist

"When I played Scriabin, I felt it was something I needed for myself," Ju says.

After completing his master's degree at the Juilliard School in New York in 2024, the then 24-year-old found himself questioning the direction of his life.

"After graduation, you leave the school system. You suddenly have to depend on yourself. I was thinking: after playing piano for more than 20 years, what am I doing? What am I going to do? Who am I?"

"For the past two years, his music has helped me a lot. It became a way to release emotions," Ju says.

Ju's relationship with the repertoire balances rigorous analysis with deeply personal expression.

In Ravel, he is captivated by structural precision — the architecture beneath the music's surface. Janacek, by contrast, draws him toward emotional consciousness and atmosphere. Scriabin, he believes, inhabits both worlds, combining visionary symbolism with extraordinary compositional discipline.

His own transcriptions raise another artistic question: how much can a performer add?

"When I arrange something, I want to express my own ideas, but I also have to respect the original composer," he says. "At first there was a conflict, but eventually I found a natural way to let my own voice exist within theirs."

These changes are not attempts to rewrite the past, but conversations across time, he adds.