Yeol Eum Son & Svetlin Roussev: Love Music
naive records

After issuing a six-and-a-half-hour recording of Mozart's complete piano sonatas in 2023, Yeol Eum Son returns with a slightly less monumental but no less engaging release, this one partnering the Korean pianist with Bulgarian violinist Svetlin Roussev for their second recital as a duo. Rather than concentrating on a single composer, the two have chosen love as the concept around which to build their programme. Works by Richard Wagner (1813-83) and others convey the transformative rapture of falling in love, but other facets of romantic experience are explored too. There is joy, yes, but heartache and longing also emerge on the sixty-eight-minute recording. Oft lyrical and emotionally expressive, the material covers a period slightly longer than half-a-century by artists influenced by Wagner.

In addition to two Mozart releases, Son's discography includes treatments of material by Berg, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Ravel, (Robert) Schumann, and Nikolai Kapustin. Roussev's repertoire is as broad, ranging as it does from Baroque material to works by contemporary composers. Both play with refinement, demonstrate exceptional technical command, and amplify the essence of a piece in their performances. Each demonstrates a fine-tuned sensitivity to the playing of the other, regardless of whether it's a rhapsody or multi-part sonata. Even in those moments where the piano is, in Son's words, “a discreet but necessary servant,” her playing is never less than arresting.

These award-winning virtuosos are thoroughly well-suited to the material at hand. Interestingly, the programme didn't grow out of the Wagner piece—“Träume,” from Wesendonck-Lieder—but instead Tristan and Isolde: Love Music, written by Franz Waxman (1906-67) as a haunting paraphrase on themes from Wagner's opera. Having determined that it would form part of the duo's album project, pieces from the late Romantic period were chosen to flesh out the set-list, including ones by Erich Korngold (1897-1957), Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962), and Richard Strauss (1864-1949). In contrast to the emotional sweep of the material by Wagner and Strauss, Kreisler's are concentrated miniatures that could be regarded as the antithesis of Wagnerian grandiosity.

After Waxman's delicately rendered opener casts its rapturous spell, Love Music advances to Korngold, with “Mariettas Lied zur Laute,” from his opera Die tote Stadt, preceding four pieces from Much Ado About Nothing, Op. 11. The duo gives tender, eloquent voice to the former, both players precisely attuned to the yearning character of the material. The Shakespeare-inspired work extends from the sweetly romantic charm of “The Maiden in the Bridal Chamber” and playful devilry of “Dogberry and Verges. March of the Watch” (its marking: “In the tempo of a grotesque funereal march”) to the lyrical sublimity of the nocturne “Scene in the Garden” and the delightful “Masquerade.” Carrying on from the radiant spirit of the latter are three light-hearted pieces from Kreisler's Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen, the “Liebesfreud” suitably joyous and the “Liebesleid” gently forlorn. It goes without saying that the playing of Son and Roussev in all such cases is totally beguiling.

Key to the album is the duo's rendering of Strauss's Violin Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 18, composed in 1887 when he was twenty-three. Reflecting a Schumann and Brahms influence, the towering sonata reflects the intense love the composer was feeling for the soprano Pauline de Ahna, later his wife. The interweaving of the instruments moves to an extremely high level for the performance, with the musicians engaging in intense conversations rather than merely accompanying one another. In the opening allegro, the long, passionate lines of their respective expressions coil sensually around one another and call upon their ability to sustain connection over ten-minute durations. It's the touching second movement, the work's “love song,” so to speak, that's most complementary to the album theme, however. How this music sings in the duo's hands during this andante.

May 2024