Su Yeon Kim: Mozart Recital
Steinway & Sons

No matter the pianist involved or the works performed, every Steinway & Sons release is cause for excitement when it makes good on the label's promise, to produce stellar recordings of solo piano music performed on some of the world's finest pianos. Su Yeon Kim's debut album upholds that tradition with a sterling set of Mozart material, the Korean pianist having dedicated many years to absorbing the composer's music and developing a comprehensive understanding of its depth and range. Adding to the clarity of the performances, the recording was captured at Sono Luminus Studios over two days in October 2022.

Born in Seoul in 1994, Kim's international profile received a significant boost when she was awarded second prize at the International Mozart Competition 2020 in Salzburg and first prize at the Concours musical international de Montréal 2021. After first attending the Korea National Institute for the Gifted in Arts, she moved to Salzburg at the age of nineteen where she studied at the Mozarteum University and began immersing herself in Mozart's world. It's impossible to convey in one recording the vastness of the composer's music, yet in her selections a broad emotional spectrum of highs and lows is encompassed, with some pieces imbued with joy and others tinged with sadness.

Things begin on a bright note with the sunny if fleeting Gigue in G major, K 574 “Eine kleine Gigue,” composed in Leipzig on May 16, 1789. The piece is brief, but it's long enough for Kim's sterling technical command to declare itself. The radiant tone of the opener carries over into four selections from 12 Contredanses for Count Czernin, K 269b, written a dozen years earlier. Folk dance elements surface, be it in the graceful moves of the lively “No. 1 in G major” or the in the elegance of the second, also in G major. The rousing “No. 3 in C major” oozes charm, after which the twelfth in the series caps the performance with breathless animation.

Two of Mozart's better-known sonatas appear, the Sonata No. 9 in D major, K 311 and Sonata No. 12 in F major, K 332. Kim executes both with characteristic elan, her affection for the material evident in every sparkling gesture. Precisely articulating its passages at light speed, she executes the ninth sonata's opening allegro breezily before imbuing her exquisite rendering of its andante with all of the requisite sensitivity it demands. Kim's fingers dance across the keyboard throughout the closing “Rondo-Allegro,” regal in one passage and effervescent in another. Her rendition of the twelfth, with its luminous allegros and lustrous adagio, is as endearing.

One of the album's more beguiling settings is Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint,” which Mozart apparently improvised during a concert as a tribute to the composer of the original aria, Christoph Willibald Gluck, who was in attendance. Over thirteen engaging minutes, the simple, majestic theme gives way to ten enthralling and imaginative variations Kim executes with aplomb. While a hint of melancholy seeps into the dramatic Allegro in G minor, K 312, the Adagio in B minor, K 540 pushes further into a funereal realm with lyrical expressions of tenderness and yearning. Kim saves the most touching piece for last, a beautifully voiced rendering of Ave verum corpus, K 618 that was originally a motet but here appears in a piano transcription by Franz Liszt.

September 2023