(Pic: Young-Choon Park)Friends of Music host memorable piano recital that gave great enjoyment to the audience. (Review by Michael Green)
Here is another rich talent from the Far East, a splendid pianist, as the Friends of Music audience at the Durban Jewish Centre soon discovered.
Young-Choon Park was born in South Korea and was a child prodigy; she gave her first full recital when she was seven and played a Beethoven concerto with the Seoul Symphony Orchestra at the age of nine. She is still, well, young, but after studying in New York and Munich she has developed an extensive concert career encompassing many countries and many orchestras.
For her Friends of Music recital she presented a programme of Scarlatti, Schubert and Chopin and steered well clear of the very familiar works that are heard so often in concert halls. It was a real pleasure to hear four of the 550 sonatas written by Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), one of the great masters of the keyboard. These are amazing works, very advanced for their time, and Young-Choon gave a dazzling demonstration of all the tricks of Scarlatti’s trade - rapid repeated notes, swift crossing of hands, unexpected shifts of melody and harmony.
I thought her tempi were sometimes a bit wayward in the most familiar item, the Sonata in D major K.96, but this is a minor criticism. She included two of the sonatas, both in F minor, which Ralph Kirkpatrick, the ultimate authority on Scarlatti’s music, places among those that were intended by the composer to be played in pairs, a fairly slow sonata followed by a fast one.
Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, D. 845, produced, I thought, the best playing of the evening. The programme note correctly said that many of Schubert’s piano sonatas were sadly neglected until the second half of the 20th century. In fact he wrote 21 sonatas, most of them of high quality, and many of them still heard but rarely at recitals. This A minor sonata must, I think, have been a revelation to some members of the audience. It was written in 1825, three years before Schubert’s death at the age of 31, and it is full of rich harmonies and haunting melodies.
Young-Choon Park is a small person but she played the work with great power, warmth and passion, extracting a remarkable sonority from the piano. And it was not all loud virtuosity. There was nothing better than her playing of the magical end of the slow movement.
Finally we were given Chopin, everybody’s favourite piano composer, represented here by the Sonata in B minor, Op. 58. Here again the pianist played with brilliant skill. It is a very difficult work, with plenty of opportunity for display by the performer, but what impressed me most was the beautifully smooth cantabile she produced in the main theme of the first movement, a melody that is one of Chopin’s finest inspirations.
A memorable recital that gave great enjoyment to the audience.
The prelude performer of the evening, funded by the National Lottery was Fae Evelyn, a South African soprano who is studying in Britain. She showed a voice of power and promise as she sang a Handel aria and two Elizabethan songs arranged by the 20th century English composer Ivor Gurney. She had the services of an expert accompanist in the form of the concert pianist Christopher Duigan. - Michael Green
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