Tag Archives: Yeol Eum Son

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

It was hard not to be impressed by the chutzpah of the programming: two of the finest Mozart Piano Concertos, Nos 21 and 24, with one of the most admired soloists of our time, Yeol Eum Son, and between them Anton Webern’s Symphony Op 21, a two-movement expression of Schoenberg’s 12-tone method that is reckoned to be among the most perfect, concise examples of that system.

With the aim of helping an audience that had – obviously – turned up in good numbers to hear the Mozart, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze preceded the Symphony with an extended introduction, full of musical illustrations, with the 12 violinists who would later be half the ensemble that played it physically embodying those 12 notes.

It was an explanation of admirable clarity, leavened with humour, but it was probably as long as the ten-minute work itself, and it did not land well with everyone in the Grand Hall. Some perhaps felt patronised, others thought Manze’s closing remarks about Webern’s death at the end of the Second World War in poor taste. An earlier joke referencing the current troubles of the house of Windsor was also bold, given that the SCO recently gave a private concert for its royal patron, King Charles.

Putting the introduction to one side – and it was a mixed blessing at best – the programming conceit worked. There is an enormous journey between the prolific Mozart’s 1785 concerto and Webern’s 1928 Symphony, but its interpolation made more obvious the distance between the up-beat C major concerto and the more complex, darker C minor one Mozart composed just a year later.

Yeul Eum Son was the soloist on the last recording Sir Neville Marriner made, of that earlier work, K467, at the beginning of her ascendancy, and almost ten years later she plays it with an elegance and effervescence few can match. This was a partnership, though, and we had already heard some top playing from the SCO before her first entry.

The articulacy of her playing in the first movement and the powerful left hand she brought into play in the closing cadenza were balanced by a willingness to step back and share the limelight. The understated way she approached the familiar slow movement, after an absolutely on point statement of the opening theme by the first violins, seemed ideal, and the closing Allegro vivace assai was a lively conversation between soloist, conductor and orchestra.

Son’s last appearance with the SCO was in May, when she performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. It has been suggested that the composer modelled his C minor work on Mozart’s, which he is known to have admired, and the finale of No 24 is certainly a long way from the music that closes the earlier concerto, and much nearer the music that Beethoven would write.

The increased volume of a larger orchestra brought no superfluous fireworks from the South Korean pianist. Her first entry was a model of restraint and the phrasing of her playing, long sentences of notes unfolding with their meaning effortlessly conveyed, was always beautiful. Once again, she took a back seat in much of the Larghetto, with the different combinations of wind soloists making as much of an impression, so that the return of the quintet of winds in the finale was especially obvious.

The structural language of the later concerto was also very clear to ears that had been honed by the Webern before the interval. The Symphony’s particular ensemble, with bass and regular clarinet, harp and a pair of horns joining the 20 strings, makes an individual sound to match the meticulous use of the work’s 12-tone row. The ever-adaptable SCO players handled the shift of gear with masterful ease, and the inclusion of the 20th century piece was, musically at least, a fascinating decision.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Visits to Scotland by pianist Yeol Eum Son – who has appeared with the BBC SSO, as an EIF Queen’s Hall recitalist, as a guest soloist in the Usher Hall’s Sunday concert series, and at the East Neuk Festival as well as with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – are to be treasured.

The opportunity to hear her play Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto would be an added incentive for many and for that work to be presented in the context of this programme, with the peerless SCO Chorus singing Haydn’s Nelson Mass in the second half, completed an unmissable bingo card that predictably attracted a good audience.

That the conceit of the programme – all three works being linked to Haydn – did not stand up to much scrutiny, as the programme notes acknowledged, was neither here nor there. The brief student/teacher relationship between Beethoven and Haydn was long over by the time of the concerto, and had never amounted to much in the  face of both composer’s driven agendas anyway.

The opening work, Brahms’ Variations on a theme by Haydn, we now know to be based on tune that had nothing at all to do with the earlier composer, whatever Brahms believed at the time. Nonetheless, the  St Anthony Chorale was worthy of his attention and his set of orchestral explorations of that raw material, employing an early music device on a piece of early music, was an ideal beginning.

The symphonic scoring makes full use of the range of pitch available from contrabassoon to piccolo and the flow of ideas comes swift and fast – ideal music for conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, always fleet of musical thought.

He and Yeol Eum Son had agreed a brisk tempo for the Beethoven too, and it was in that context that her first entry, phrased with conversational pauses, was so immediately arresting. Her playing was captivating from start to finish, precision filigree ripples and runs married to a mighty left hand and technical mastery always at the service of emotional expression. Beethoven had recently emerged from a time of documented personal turmoil and a sense of that ran through Eum Son’s performance as well as a delight in the musical artistry – radical as it was at the time – inherent in the work.

If Beethoven was pushing the envelope with the Third Piano Concerto, Haydn was ever the opportunist in (re)naming his Nelson Mass in honour of the victorious English Admiral who attended an early performance. Originally it had been his “Missa in angustiis” or “Mass for troubled times”, and perhaps reinstating that title would suit our own times.

It needs a terrific soprano soloist, and had one in this performance in Anna Dennis, on stellar form. There was nothing at all wrong with the rest of the vocal front line either, and mezzo Katie Bray, tenor Anthony Gregory and bass baritone Neal Davies took their briefer moments in the spotlight well and also combined beautifully, notably on the Benedictus quartet.

As usual, Emelyanychev had thought carefully about the placing of his musicians, with the vocal soloists in front of the chorus but behind the players, and the bass instruments split across the platform, a returned Nikita Naumov partnered by bassoonist Cerys Ambrose-Evans stage right and the other pair of double basses stage left.

The result was an integrated sound which showcased the orchestra as much as it did the choir, immaculately prepared by Gregory Batsleer.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Yeol Eum Son by Andrew Castro

EIF: Dunedin | Yeol Eum Son

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Fresh from their success with Mozart’s Mass in C at the London Proms, John Butt’s Dunedin Consort turned their attention to J S Bach for an Edinburgh Festival Queen’s Hall performance of all four Orchestral Suites. They are fascinating works, the composer drawing together prevailing features of the 18th century Italian and French styles to create a high Baroque sound that, if arguably German in character, is unarguably Bach.

Few understand that better than the excellent Dunedin players, responding to Butt’s innate knowledge of the composer and his refreshing and personable insight into Baroque performance style with complete assurance, mixed with an almost self-governing freedom and bountiful spontaneity. There wasn’t a moment in this concert where the music spoke without natural sparkle and captivating expressiveness.

What gave it all a pleasing aesthetic balance was the inherent diversity of the various suites themselves: two opulent D major ones, Nos 3 and 4 respectively, topped by glorious phalanxes of oboes and trumpets and which Butt, directing form the harpsichord, sensibly placed as the opening and closing works; the more delicately-scored C Major (No 1) and flute-dominated B minor (No 2) providing a softer, creamier centre. 

Stars emerged, but never out of context. Katy Bircher’s flute playing in the concerto-like B minor Suite was subtly prominent, the tenor of her performance proudly virtuosic yet generously integrated, tempered naturally by the delicacy of her period instrument. Minimum strings made for a sinewy, compact unit, fired by Bach’s dazzling writing and their own swashbuckling counter-play. In the larger-scaled suites, it was the martial thrill of the trumpets and timpani that blew us away. Bach as it should be, stimulating and sublime.

Tuesday’s Queen’s Hall recital by South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son came from a later time zone, the heady Romanticism of the 19th century in the wake of Beethoven. That composer’s presence was both the climax of the programme and its fundamental starting point. Son’s second half featured a single work, Beethoven’s late Sonata, the ‘Hammerklavier’, and one that must have startled its original audiences.

For this pianist it seemed to represent a logical product of the composer’s earlier, though in many cases equally provocative, sonatas. She immediately embraced the irascibility of the opening, its splintered rhetoric and impatient questioning, a beast that is never fully tamed in the volatile first movement. Her Scherzo evoked, as it should, a more even temperament, crisp and lithesome, yet still with darker shadows hovering. There was tenderness and thoughtfulness in her Adagio, more cool than ethereal, tossed brutally aside by the sheer bullishness of the closing fugue.

Leading up to all this, Son chose a series of mainly variation-type concert pieces that traced a notional lineage from Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, through his own pupil Liszt to Bizet and the troubled French piano virtuoso Alkan. It was a colourful journey, beginning with Bizet’s kaleidoscopic Variations Chromatiques, a flowering of imaginative diversions germinating from the most perfunctory of themes. 

In Czerny’s Variations on a Theme by Rode (’La Ricordanza’), Son flouted her immaculate finger precision and effortless facility, not least in a final variation sounding like stride piano before its time, but not before stilling the atmosphere with the work’s simplistic theme. Liszt’s Trancendental Study No 9, also subtitled ‘Ricordanza’, emerged almost like a postscript, yet characterised by its own expansive eloquence.

Finally, Alkan’s Variations on a Theme of Steibelt took us to the interval, its childish theme mischievously deceptive, given the ensuing maelstrom of notes that increased exponentially as Alkan’s characteristic virtuoso demands breached the near impossible. Never a problem, though, for this engaging pianist. 

Ken Walton

East Neuk Festival 1

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Kilkenny Church / Crail Church

Maybe it was too much to ask of the Scottish weather that the scorcher we’d enjoyed throughout June remain firmly  in place for the 2023 East Neuk Festival. In the event, the close of the month, coinciding with the first two days of the Festival, offered more typical climatic variables – a sizzling Thursday followed by a cool, showery Friday – and so did the music.

Thursday’s performances felt like a congenial warm-up: two really interesting programmes delivered with just a suspicion of settling in – not exactly unexpected after the impact and hangover of Covid. 

First up was a return ENF visit by French-Canadian cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, a solo recital in the amiable ambience of Kilrenny Church that began in the 20th century – a selection of Geörgy Kurtág’s étude-like aphorisms – and ended with the sanguine Bach Cello Suite in C minor. It was in the former – incendiary miniatures scattered among the progressive Hungarian composer’s output like personal journal entries – that Queyras realised the most positive impact, incisive and colourful interpretations that nailed the ballistic concentration of the music.

Beyond that, Queyras’ playing was probing and eloquent, emotive in its realisation of the inner musings expressed by Turkish composer Ahmet Annan Saygun in his Bach-like Partita for Cello, yet as a consequence, too free in its rhythmic definition, which tended to rob the ensuing Bach Suite, and two other short Baroque pieces, of their natural energy.

There was no lack of oomph in that evening’s Crail Church programme by the Belcea Quartet and Friends, which saw the familiar core ensemble augmented with Queyras and feisty Berlin Philharmonic violist Diyang Mei for a gritty performance of Brahms’ String Sextet No 1 in B flat, prefaced by a bombastic solo performance of movements from Liszt’s Les Années de Pèlerinage Book II by pianist Bertrand Chamanyou.

Chamanyou’s Liszt was epic, power-driven at times to the point of near-destruction, yet shot through with plentiful moments of deep sensitivity and flowing virtuosity to counter its viciousness. The closing Dante-inspired work was a case in point, thrillingly apocalyptic, but edging towards tonal distortion. If the Brahms adopted something of that bravado mentality, it was to mostly positive ends and a performance attuned fittingly to both the music’s homogenous richness and internal strife.

Friday held its own fascination, a thrilling late morning Kilrenny programme by the Castalian Quartet, followed late afternoon by an individualistic solo recital from South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son. 

Previous visits by the Castalian Quartet have been notable for the naturalness with which they strike a classy balance between the individual and the body corporate. Such was the magical essence of a Mozart Quartet in D minor that divulged, through a combination of smiling interaction and devious self opinion, its awakening drama and characterful grace. Fuller passions emerged in the Dvorak, yet enlivened by that same flexible discipline and measured effusion.

Like the Castalians, Yeol Eum Son will be back in Scotland later this summer for the Edinburgh International Festival, which on this evidence will be a starry twin attraction. Son, whose recent recordings of the complete Mozart piano sonatas were singularly impressive, played two of these works in her Crail programme. In the C Minor Fantasy her total immersion in the music was fascinating, at the same time unnerving. She seemed to agonise over the opining of the Fantasy, as if deliberately deconstructing its flow. One the other hand, the C minor Sonata took its natural course, a little short on lyrical inevitability perhaps, but genuinely spirited.

Impetuousness had its place in Janacek’s Sonata No 1 (From the Street), with its disturbing transformations – quite Jekyll and Hyde in character and style – and wild excursions between achingly suspended time and crashing climaxes. Son signed off with exuberant flair in the Sonata No 2 by Ukrainian composer Nikolay Kapustin. It is unadulterated jazz, frenzied improvisation writ large, played here with breathtaking virtuosity and physical abandon. It had its tender moments – a bluesy Largo with super-heated harmonies – but the emphasis was on showmanship, which Son applied full on. She leapt from her stool in the final flurry of madcap glissandi; we all but jumped from our own seats in instant response.

Ken Walton 

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

Throughout the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s near half-century existence, one of the greatest joys has been the orchestra’s intimate connection with Mozart. It was present once again in this final 2022 programme, which featured the classy South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 27 in B flat, and flashed up pleasurable memories of the complete Mozart concerto series performed with the same magnetic poise by pianist Mitsuko Uchida with the SCO way back in the 1980s.

Eum Son’s delivery had the same honesty and purity about it, lightning finger work precisely placed, an evenness of tone informing crystalline phrase, and a composure that allowed the music to express its intentions with natural elan. That conductor Andrew Manze – whose violin-playing days were once equally notable for their clean-cut Mozart – was of the same mind, brought a satisfying unity of purpose to the performance.

It was clear from the unending applause that Eum Son had no option but to deliver an encore, and boy did she oblige with the chattering brilliance of Moritz Moskowski’s Etincelles (Sparks) Op 36 No 6, like Scarlatti on steroids and offering a pyrotechnic glimpse of the pianist’s showier persona.

All this came immediately after the Concerto for String Orchestra by another amazing woman, Grazyna Bacewicz. As a pioneering female Polish composer in mid-20th-century male-dominated Europe, who had previously established herself as a celebrated violinist, it’s clear from this gutsy work (and others that have increasingly crept into concert programmes in recent years) that she was a voice to to be reckoned with.

Bullish, ultra-confident and instantly arresting, the opening movement was one unstoppable adrenalin rush, Manze drawing visceral heat from his eager, belligerent players. The wrestling complexity of the Allegro, a sizzling cauldron of thematic conflict, gave way to the more restful, rich-textured Andante, before the hi-octane finale, with its rhythmic twists and turns, produced a relentless, resolute dash to the finishing line. 

Manze completed his programme with music more often reserved for larger entities than the SCO, Dvorak’s Symphony No 7 – some may recall a BBC SSO performance a couple of weeks ago under Portuguese conductor Nuno Coelho. What transpired, though, was a refreshing reconsideration of its expressive potential. Where the string numbers were limited, the quality of sound was so alive and intense it captured details in the textural world of this heated symphony that are rarely heard.

As is standard with Manze, this was a programme brimming with refreshing thoughts, studiously intelligent on the one hand, passionately revealing on the other.

Ken Walton

Photo credit: Marco Borggreve

BBC SSO / Carneiro

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City Halls, Glasgow

Stravinsky’s Petrushka seemed the inevitable endpoint to a BBC SSO afternoon concert that had explored, en route, the defiant energy of Anna Clyne’s pulverising «rewind« and the iridescent intensity of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto.

It was a journey that sizzled under the charismatic, needle-sharp direction of Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro. From her initial ebullient stage entrance, and a first downbeat fearsome enough to set the audience, never mind the players, on the edge of their seats, she had us completely under her spell.

Clyne’s opening work – a reworking of her original 2005 orchestra and tape version for Kitty McNamee’s Hysterica Dance Company – pulled no punches. Vigorous, uncompromisingly repetitive, and with glittering, intoxicating textures to offset the dry brutality of its punctuating chords, it was met with a blistering performance equal to its intent. The SSO was on red hot form.

They were joined by the South Korean pianist, Yeol Eum Son, for Salonen’s 2007 three-movement Concerto. Written originally for the Israeli-American pianist Yefim Bronfman, it is consequently robust, physically intense and fiercely virtuosic. Eum Son had no problems making it her own, matching its muscular demands with a gracefulness that was mostly effective in the numerous conversations the soloist engages in with single instruments.

Salonen, best known as a leading conductor, is no slouch when it comes to composition. Within a personal stye that is as soulful as it is viciously dissonant, he seamlessly ingests influences as varied as Bartok, Adams, Gershwin and Stravinsky in this work, which itself lends to an elusive circumspection – the constant flow of new ideas seemingly arising out of fresh air – that this performance highlighted.

Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1947 version) came as an inevitable resolution to these two foregoing works. And once again, Carneiro’s electric presence inspired a top-notch response. Incisive and impulsive from the outset, it was a performance heightened by kaleidoscopic sensitivities, rhythmic precision and an unrelenting sense of unanimity from an orchestra wholly reactive to this highly impressive conductor.

Ken Walton