Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son joins the Auckland Philharmonia and conductor Giordano Bellincampi for Chopin's Second Piano Concerto and the orchestra plays Mendelssohn and Schumann either side.
Yeol Eum Son Photo: Marco Borggreve www.marcoborggreve.com
Yeol Eum got a career boost in 2004 when she was just 18, appearing with the New York Philharmonic and conductor Lorin Maazel in performances of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto on an Asian tour. She went on to receive Silver Medals at both the Van Cliburn Competition and the International Tchaikovsky Competition.
Now entering mid-career, she’s played all around the world with many of the leading orchestras and conductors, and this season (2022-2023) she has a residency in the Netherlands with The Hague Philharmonic and The Royal Conservatory of the Hague.
She’s also a writer and contributes a regular column to the JoongAng, one of the big newspapers in South Korea.
This is her first appearance in New Zealand.
MENDELSSOHN: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
Mendelssohn based his Overture ‘Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage’ on a pair of poems by Goethe: ‘Calm Sea’ … and … ‘Prosperous Voyage’. In the days of sailing ships, “calm sea”, rather than being a pleasant condition, meant no wind and you were going nowhere. So these two terms indicate opposites.
Mendelssohn described his calm sea…: “a pitch gently sustained by the strings for a long while hovers here and there and trembles, barely audible... The whole stirs sluggishly … with heavy tedium. Finally, it comes to a halt with thick chords and the Prosperous Voyage sets out. All the wind instruments, the timpani, oboes and flutes... playing merrily to the end.”
CHOPIN: Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor Op 21
Chopin wrote this piano concerto while he was still a student in Warsaw at the age of 19 or 20. It’s numbered as his second, but that’s because it was published second … it was in fact written before the First Concerto.
Both of them are showcases for Chopin’s pianism – its virtuosity and its lyrical eloquence. The orchestra really only plays a supporting role. In fact it’s believed that he may not have actually done all the orchestration himself – a couple of his fellow composers in Warsaw may have helped him out.
There are the usual three movements and the second plays like one of his Nocturnes. Apparently, he had a crush on the young singer Konstancja Gładkowska at the time and this is his love song for her, although he hardly knew her. That’s how the story goes anyway – it sounds as if it could be a little bit creepy, but there's no evidence that he made any inappropriate contact with her. Just a young man’s mooning infatuation manifested in a gorgeous piece of music.
Not long after, Chopin left Warsaw for Paris, taking this concerto with him. And there it was described as the “rebirth of piano music”. The Parisians loved the sensitivity, poeticism and beauty of sound that Chopin brought to the instrument. But he also dazzled them with his rippling virtuosity. Talk about infatuation – he became the object of fascination.
CHOPIN: Waltz in C# minor Op 64/2
An encore from Yeol Eum Son
SCHUMANN: Symphony No 4 in D minor Op 120
1841, the year after Robert Schumann's so-called ‘year of song’, was now the year he devoted to the orchestra. He began with the Spring Symphony ... a relatively conventional first symphony. He followed that with a few other works and then started work on this D minor Symphony.
It had a premiere performance later that year in Leipzig, but it didn’t go down all that well. The audience may have been tired ... it was a very long concert and during it they’d been blasted with a stunning duo performance from none other than Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann – two of the best pianists of the day.
Robert – although he considered the symphony a fine work – put it away in a drawer. He got it out ten years later and reworked it somewhat. He darkened some of the colours and slowed down some of the tempos ... giving it extra gravitas.
By that time he’d written his second and third symphonies, so this one became his fourth.
Some people have advocated for the original 1841 version with its lighter textures – notably, Johannes Brahms and the British musicologist Donald Tovey. But not Clara Schumann – she was forthright that the revision was all for the better.
There are four movements, but they are played without breaks, flowing one into the next. And some of the ideas from the first movement make their way into the later movements. Schumann called it a ‘symphonic fantasy’ when he first wrote it.
Recorded by RNZ Concert in Auckland Town Hall, 24 November 2022
Producer: Adrian Hollay
Engineer: Rangi Powick
