Cue up Yekwon Sunwoo’s recent recording, Liszt, and brace yourself for fireworks. What comes first instead is song.
For more than half an hour, nearly everything centers on melodies that once had words, Liszt’s textures, from lace to thunder, spun around them. The first selection is a song borrowed from a 19th-century duke. Three meditations follow, including the famous Liebestraum, which began life as one of Liszt’s own songs. Then come settings of songs by Schubert and Mendelssohn, followed by love songs from Schumann and Joseph Dessauer (a composer I imagine few of us are acquainted with). Only near the end does Sunwoo launch the fireworks, from a night at Verdi’s opera to a tavern visit from a violinist devil.
We have the privilege of hearing the album’s final act live, right here in Corvallis, when Sunwoo performs these last three tracks for us after intermission.
Sunwoo grew up in South Korea and came to the United States at age 15 to study with Seymour Lipkin at the Curtis Institute of Music, then went on to Juilliard and Mannes, where he worked with Richard Goode. In 2017 he won the Gold Medal at the Fifteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Liszt, released by Decca this past May, is his third studio album, after a pair showcasing Mozart and Rachmaninoff.
Speaking in Korean when the recording came out, he told the news agency Yonhap, “Liszt is a composer full of splendor, but I wanted to create an album that remembers him for the human voice and lyricism within it.”
The sound he’s after is surprisingly delicate. He told The Korea Herald that he lifts the sound a little as he plays, reaching for a soap bubble, clear glass marble, or “fine wine glass that might shatter at the lightest touch.” He contrasts this with the heavier, denser sound he hears in Rachmaninoff.
He recorded Liszt in Berlin, in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in the Dahlem neighborhood, where Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic made many of their recordings. Sunwoo was concerned that churches ring too long to be suitable for recording. However, this one carries just the right amount of resonance, along with a depth of sound he felt suited the album the moment he started playing.
Carry the image into the hall: Liszt’s pyrotechnics in the hands of a pianist who’s thinking about something diaphanous.
And herein lies a problem as old as the piano itself: The piano can’t literally sing. The felt hammer strikes a string, the note fades the instant it sounds. A singer (or a violinist) can swell a long note to carry into the next one. We pianists can’t do that. Every bit of “singing” you hear from a piano is an illusion, built as much from what happens between the notes as from the notes themselves.
For me, this requires I use my whole self and sing along. At the keyboard, it comes down to a few physical things: slow, rolling attacks, so each note blooms instead of pops; rubato, a give and take of time, so a leap between two notes takes the time a singer would need to make it; and overlapping each sound slightly into the next, so one note is still in the air when the next arrives.
Liszt leaned into the challenge. He devoted much of his composing to setting other people’s works for the piano: operas, symphonies and, above all, songs. This is the art of transcription, which in the days before recordings played a significant role in how music traveled. If you wanted to hear Schubert’s songs, Beethoven’s symphonies, or Verdi’s latest opera at home, you could play them on the piano. Liszt’s reimaginings carried dozens of Schubert’s songs into parlors and concert halls across Europe. The tricky bit is that the words aren’t there—but the singing has to stay. One pianist plays the singer and collaborative pianist together, keeping the melody aloft while also supplying everything around it.
Sunwoo has a lovely take on what Liszt does with these songs: Schubert’s songs, he says, give voice to the feelings a person keeps buried inside; Liszt takes the same songs and spreads them across a broader canvas, more dramatic and richly colored. Seven of the album’s eleven tracks have their genesis as songs, and track nine is an entire opera scene. Give the recording a listen and you hear the voice everywhere, even within the fireworks.
In Corvallis, the Liszt group opens with singing. The Rigoletto Paraphrase, the recording’s bridge from song to showpiece, sets an opera scene in which four characters sing over one another onto a single keyboard. Then comes the famous Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which Sunwoo performs with Rachmaninoff’s own cadenza, followed by the Mephisto Waltz No. 1. On the recording, the Rhapsody is the grand finale. In recital, Sunwoo switches the order, so the devil gets the last word.
Our afternoon, and the Steinway Piano Series, opens with Chopin’s Fourth Ballade. Chopin loved the great opera singers of his day and urged his students to learn from them, and the ballade’s first melody is marked mezza voce, “in half voice.” Then we hear Rachmaninoff’s Moments musicaux, where the melodies rise out of thick, dark textures, the weight Sunwoo hears in that composer. After intermission comes the specific “wine glass” sound he reaches for in Liszt. Weight, then transparency, and different answers to the same question: How do you make a piano sing?
Want a preview of the Liszt? This past May, STAGE+ filmed his recital at the Seoul Arts Center, and its second half includes our program’s three pieces in the same order (STAGE+ is a subscription service). The album itself is on Spotify as well as other streaming services.
Then come hear it in the hall. Sunwoo’s recital is Sunday, November 8, at 4:00 p.m. in the Lynne Hallstrom Detrick Concert Hall at PRAx, and students get in for $5, so please bring one. Listen for the wine glass. But hold on, because this time the fireworks do come.
One more note: Sunwoo’s bios have described him as a devoted foodie who hunts down pho in every city he tours. Corvallis, you know what to do.
~ Matt Goodrich
