November 13, 2025

Emily White: Good afternoon. I’m Emily White, and I’m here with one of the most inspiring pianists on the Hungarian—and international!—music scenes, the acclaimed artist János Balázs. Professor Balázs, should I call you János?

János Balázs: Yes.

EW: János has just given a fascinating program at Weill Recital Hall in honor of the legendary virtuoso György Cziffra (1921–1994), who was a great-grandpupil of Franz Liszt. So, János, I understand that you had an early start to your career—you were accepted to study at the Special School of the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest at the age of thirteen. Could you talk a little bit about your early teachers and how you were taught?

JB: Yes, it was a great time. You know, my father is a pianist, but he’s not a classical pianist. He’s a jazz and bar pianist. When I was a child, I heard a lot of music at my home, and I just know that the music is something magical and it’s very good to play together. Of course, there always was a piano at our flat. But my father’s music was not the very first touch for me at the piano. The first time it was after I heard the recording of Cziffra’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. It was not on LP, it was on 78, and it was so magical. When I was three or four years old, I heard it and I just went to the piano. I remember the first melody I would like to try. It was the Second Rhapsody’s theme, “Da-da, puh, pum,” you know? It was a lot of hours a day, like a game for me, a lovely game. My father’s father played together with György Cziffra, but not on the stage! They played in a bar, because Cziffra was a bar pianist in Budapest, a few years before he went to Paris, and my grandfather was a cellist. This recording of the Hungarian Rhapsodies was a souvenir from György Cziffra for my grandfather. When I was three, I started to play a lot of classical improvisation, and when I was six, I started at the music school. I remember, I played the Beethoven “Pathétique” Sonata without a score, just by ear like a Beethoven fantasy. And my first teacher, Erika Becht, said, “Oh, my God, it’s like genius, and it’s so BAD.” Because I cannot read a score but I can play a lot of hours of music. She was an angel. She was the first who gave me a lot of inspiration by the score. She said, “János, let’s check, maybe Beethoven wrote something better than you can even imagine.”  So that was the first. I won a national competition when I was eight, in Nyíregyháza, and when I was thirteen, I started my study at the Liszt Academy Special Talent Groups. The Liszt Academy is one of the most important of the world, because of Franz Liszt. Bartók and Kodály and Cziffra and Fischer and all of the Hungarian artists, they were in the same building. My teacher through the graduate diploma, Kálmán Drafi, was a great master of the piano, and he was a pupil of György Cziffra at Senlis, near Paris, for three years. I went to a lot of competitions, not the most important, but in Hungary we have the International Liszt Competition and I won first prize, and I won first prize in the György Cziffra Competition, very important for me because he was my idol. This was better than winning a Chopin competition or the Rubinstein competition—I know that they are more prestigious—but for me, Cziffra was the highest level. I don’t know your opinion, but generally I don’t like competitions.

EW: You mentioned studying without reading. When did you start really reading the music?

JB: Around eight or nine. I could play hours of classical music from my fantasy. I played Rigoletto Paraphrase, Rachmaninoff concertos, like little transcriptions, melodies with chords. I like improvising, so in my Carnegie concert, there was a part where I played improvisations on Hungarian folk songs, in classical style, not jazz, like Liszt or Chopin. There were a lot of possibilities for improvisation onstage.

EW: In the United States, there are some teachers now who like to give a famous song or symphony theme to children so it inspires them, and there are others who think this is not original piano music and you should avoid that because it’s not something you could play in a competition.

JB: I think it’s very important to know the music without the score, to know general music. For me, the music is in my mind and I can think about the music’s language. If I read the score, after, I just realize it, and I start to play by heart. My mind is able to search harmonies for the melodies without dissonance.

EW: You feel that the printed score is just a pathway to what’s already in your ear.

JB: That’s it, yes. So now I play 39 piano concertos.

EW: That’s a lot.

JB: By heart, without score. And I’m not a genius, but I started very early to know music, and for me, with a new piece, I never start with the notes. Because I know the structure and the harmony, I feel it.

EW: Do you find as you get deeper into the score, looking at it, that your previous interpretation changes and evolves, or do you find that the printed music reinforces what you had in your mind all along?

JB: A very good question. First is the score, but sometimes before you see the score, you listen to somebody, Horowitz, Richter, and you have an idea, I would like to learn this piece because Horowitz does it like this. But when you take the score to the piano, you give it a totally other character. And I start to search, but it’s a never-ending story. I learned the Fountains of the Villa D’Este when I was eleven or twelve, and almost all of my concerts have a generally other feeling. Because the piano is other, the acoustic is other—I don’t mean that I play different notes, but I feel other emotions, and I would like to make something different from what the public expects.

EW: So does your interpretation change when you play on different occasions?

JB: Yes. And sometimes I change on the stage. Because I was never shy. 90% of it is worked out, but about 10% is in the performance.

EW: You want to be spontaneous.

JB: Absolutely. But of course this means that before it, I must know the piece 150%. If you’re nervous, you can’t feel the ideas. You have to be at the best technical level with the piece, to make some joy. It’s not easy, and sometimes I feel too much. I really love the pieces I play, and you know, I was onstage at Carnegie, and then I had to make choices very quickly, because there’s no time for philosophy: which is the best way to play it? But this game gives me extra energy onstage.

EW: Let’s talk more about Cziffra. He was nicknamed the pianist with fifty fingers! I know he came from a Romani (Gypsy) background and he studied with Ernst von Dohnányi at the Liszt Academy until 1941, when he was conscripted into the army during World War Two, and he was captured by the Russians and held as a prisoner of war. Are there aspects of Cziffra’s life that you try to bring out?

JB: He was a hero. He never lost motivation for music even though his life was a tragedy. There were a lot of deep problems, especially from his childhood. He had a very poor family, he had health problems, and there was the First World War, the Second World War, the Revolution in Hungary in 1956, he was in jail and had to work . . .

EW: He was in a labor camp and was forced to carry 130 pounds of concrete up six flights of stairs and his wrist was damaged. He wore a leather band on his wrist. Could he play after that?

JB: He never gave up. The most important was to make music on the stage. It’s incredible motivation. It was very easy for him to play in a bar because he was a star with a lot of money. He was rich but he felt that it’s not enough to play in a bar with everybody eating and smoking cigars, it’s not the real way. But after he left, he started to play classical music in Budapest, and after the revolution everybody knows his career and it was incredible. ’56 was the revolution, he left Hungary, and in ’57 he played in Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

EW: What did he play in that concert?

JB: The Liszt First Concerto and Hungarian Fantasy.

EW: [The date of the concert was November 1, 1958, YouTube link https://youtu.be/HJ_Ajv-rZp0]

EW: He founded a music festival and a competition in France. Have you visited those places?

JB: Yes. When he was on the top, he bought a chapelle, a church in a bad situation because it was a garage, and he made the renovations. He invested all of his money and all of his efforts in young talents. And you know his son was a great conductor and they worked together, they made a lot of recordings. But the fire accident . . .

EW: Right, a tragedy.

JB: His son died. It was the highest tragedy. And after that he stopped playing and just gave master classes.

EW: 2021 was his 100^th anniversary. What did you do for memorial events?

JB: 2016 was the first György Cziffra Festival in Budapest. Before that, when I was sixteen, I started to care for his legacy with a concert “in memory of György Cziffra,” student concerts at the Liszt Academy. They kept getting bigger audiences, and I thought this is a good time. I started in 2016 with five concerts, and it was like a shock, a bomb. All the concerts were more than standing ovation. Everybody felt that Cziffra came back to Hungary. He died in 1994, so many years before. My wife is the director of the festival, and I am the artistic director, but now we have a bigger team. We felt we must continue. For the hundredth anniversary we opened to an international level. We went to France, to Rome, Brussels, Geneva, more than a hundred concerts on the series in 2021. That’s why I played the concert in Carnegie Hall a few days ago. We are on the way. It’s the biggest honor for my festival.

EW: So you’re still riding this big wave.

JB: You know the conductor Péter Eötvös, he wrote for me a piano concerto dedicated to Cziffra, and the name was “Cziff-Rhapsody” [Cziffra Psodia, 2020], a funny name, and we played with the greatest orchestras. The last time we played it was with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London.

EW: He isn’t alive anymore, Péter Eötvös.

JB: He died about two years ago. All of the concerts we played together, he was the conductor. But also, we have more than concerts, we have support programs for young artists. We spend a lot of energy and money, we have a lot of scholarships and prizes, we have master classes, and everybody is free. Talented musicians have talent but no money, so we have to help them with the skill of the artistic level and the greatest teachers, the greatest artists. I think in the next concert, I have an invitation for next November at Carnegie Hall, and I will play with my students.

EW: Do the master classes take place in Hungary or in different countries?

JB: Yes, in Hungary and in different countries. When I travel for a concert, usually I give a master class.

EW: I’m sure there are pianists who would try to get involved.

JB: They need it. I listen to a lot of Romantic music, especially Liszt, and they play very well but not “with spice.”

EW: How did you come to meet Péter Eötvös?

JB: In Hungary we knew each other, and I started a conversation with him, and I asked if he would like to write a piano concerto for Cziffra. He said, “Oh, what an idea! Please give me a week.” And he called me back and said, “Okay, I have the main melody.” The letters of Cziffra: C, C# [Z=Cis], F, F, Re, A. And the tempo, the metronome is 100, for the anniversary.

EW: Cool.

JB: And he wrote for cimbalom in the orchestra, because Cziffra’s father was a cimbalist.

EW: Like a dulcimer with hammers. That’s kind of a café instrument, isn’t it?

JB: Gypsy instrument in a café or a bar, it’s very Hungarian. The concerto has a lot of cadenzas and Gypsy rhythms, and we play together, piano and cimbalom, and improvisation at times.

EW: I wanted to talk about this prize. In 2019, at age 31, you were named the youngest winner of the Kossuth Prize. For people who don’t know, it was created in honor of the statesman and Prime Minister Lajos Kossuth, in 1948 on the centennial of the Revolution of 1848. It’s for artists, scientists, and musicians, and I’m sure everyone knows some of the musical recipients: Zoltán Kodály (1948, the first winner), Annie Fischer (1949 and other years), Zoltán Kocsis (1978), as well as András Schiff, György Ligeti, and Ernst von Dohnányi, who died in 1960 but was awarded posthumously in 1990. How did you become associated with this historic list of honorees?

JB: This prize in Hungary is like the Oscar, or the Nobel Prize. Usually, the jury and the Prime Minister think about it, I’m sorry to say, before you die, not like 31. I think there were two reasons: the first is that I’m so active in Hungary and I spend all of my energy on the music for Hungary and open to the world. The second, I think, is because of my high level of piano playing and the care of the György Cziffra heritage.

EW: There should be more international exchange than there is right now, because we don’t really know about each other. The cultures are very distinct, and there are amazing people who could learn a lot.

JB: We have a lot of cultural connections, and we like freedom. You know, more than ten years ago, I went to the Aspen Music Festival. And I learned the most from Yoheved Kaplinsky. It was magic for me because it was a totally other style, and I won the “house” music competition at Aspen with the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody. Before I arrived, I was not ready with this concerto, and I learned it with Veda, and she was great. I realized, we start from another position, and we all want to arrive at the same position.

EW: You make student contacts at festivals for your whole life. You were at Aspen in what year?

JB: I think 2010.

EW: You have a very broad-ranging repertoire, like Manuel Ponce.

JB: Ponce is my favorite. I learned this melody [Estrellita] listening to Jascha Heifetz, and I really wanted to make a transcription. I also love Lauretta’s aria [“O mio babbino caro,” from Gianni Schicchi] by Puccini, and a very funny transcription of Happy Birthday in styles by Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, and Liszt. It was my encore at Carnegie. I am not a composer, maybe in the future, but I just like to show my imagination in the music.

EW: I see that you learned all the works of Chopin? You were honored by Poland for your dedication to Chopin. How did it start?

JB: Because when I started to learn his pieces, it was never enough. And I learned the next and the next. For me it’s never a problem to learn the music without scores. Generally, I play it twice or three times and I can play from memory.

EW: What were the first pieces and what were the ones you saved for later?

JB: The first piece was the Nocturne, opus 9, number 2. I played for a series sixteen concerts in Hungary and I played all of his pieces. I played the chamber music and concertos, everything.

EW: Oh, my gosh.

JB: The sensibility, the intimate sound of Chopin is very important.

EW: What did you learn last?

JB: The last was the C-minor Sonata.

EW: With the 5/4. People don’t play it, but it’s very effective. Now some people say that pianists are better either at playing Chopin or playing Liszt, but you seem to be at home with both composers. Do you feel an affinity for one or the other?

JB: I think, when you play Chopin, you have to play like Liszt, and Liszt you have to play like Chopin. If you play Chopin and it’s too intimate, too pianissimo, too shy, it’s not the best, but if you play Liszt and you kill the piano, it’s also wrong. It’s good to know the Liszt pieces and the Chopin pieces and you can make a conversation between the two composers. They were very good friends. After Chopin died, Liszt wrote a book about him.

EW: Do you feel that certain kinds of instrumental sounds are better for conveying your vision of Liszt, or a specific technological setup is better for Chopin?

JB: Usually, I play on a Steinway. In Hungary, we have a new early music center with very historic old pianos, and I was there to check the Erard piano from Liszt’s era. It was a totally other sound.

EW: There’s a Historical Piano Study Center in Ashburnham, Massachusetts if you ever have time to go there. It’s hard to keep an Erard piano in shape, but it gives you a different aura of the music.

JB: Very important is what you feel inside, to play because you would like to give something of yourself. I play the Steinway more like the historical pedal system. Sometimes I like to make some noise, not always clear with the pedal. In the Chopin Ballades, you might have three chords in one beat, but if you change the pedal, it’s too much like a motor. You have to feel the chords together, in a Romantic style, and also what you hear is not what the public hears.

EW: The pedal on Chopin’s Broadwood piano in London never smeared sounds the way the pedal does now. Do you think that Chopin and Liszt were influenced by organ pedals?

JB: I’m sure. Liszt loved church music, and Chopin idolized Bach and always played the Well-Tempered Clavier.

EW: There are all sorts of ways to give that feeling of mysticism.

JB: I’m so happy to have composers close to me but I have not enough time to make their music the best way. You have to choose how to find the polyphony and the melodies without playing too hard.

EW: Do you like to study the musicology about Liszt or read Alan Walker’s books? Alan Walker was given an honorary doctorate by the Liszt Academy just this year.

JB: Yes, I know. I always like to read about the lives of the composers, a lot of sad stories.

EW: He had a scary book about the death of Liszt. Were you also drawn to Bartók? Did he pull on your heartstrings?

JB: I like the recordings, but not all his pieces are close to me. For me, the top pianist is—I don’t know—Vladimir Horowitz, Richter, Martha Argerich in our era. She is the best. Sometimes even better at her age than before! I asked her, “Martha, how can you be better now than when you were twenty or thirty years old?” And she said, “I practice now.”

EW: I noticed on November 20^th you’re already giving a recital back in Budapest at the Bartók National Concert Hall. You like to go around from one place to the other.

JB: I’ve done it for twenty years.

EW: Well, János, thank you for a great conversation, and I hope we can keep in touch!

JB: I loved this conversation.

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

Jungwon Sun, piano

Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY

June 24, 2025

The enormous program offered by pianist Jungwon Sun at Weill Recital Hall on the evening of June 24, 2025 was originally slated to be even more enormous. Ms. Sun’s impressive repertoire is vast enough for her to have replaced Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor with the late Sonata Op. 101 in A major, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor with the Paraphrase on Rigoletto, and Barber’s Piano Sonata with Persichetti’s Sonata No. 6, while preserving Ravel’s fiendishly difficult La Valse. (This brings to mind Ruth Laredo’s recital years ago at the Maryland Piano Festival, with hundreds of eager fans primed to hear Barber’s Sonata, when Ms. Laredo spontaneously substituted La Valse as the evening’s closing piece.)  Barber’s monumental absence notwithstanding, the preferred cornucopia here showed off Ms. Sun’s significant capabilities, as well as her eclectic tastes.

Harpsichord sonatas by the Baroque Italian-Spanish Domenico Scarlatti have been grouped fashionably in pairs since 1953, when Ralph Kirkpatrick renumbered the 555 or so essercizi to reflect newly discovered evidence of their chronology and almost certain juxtaposition. D minor, in the case of the spiritually demanding, melancholy K. 213, probably would have led to a romping Allegro vivo D major, K. 214 (although modern performers are free to experiment with other combinations). Ms. Sun chose to introduce her concert with two delicate, tender gems, though unrelated, in D minor, which she presented in an ingratiating and flowing manner. Eschewing the profound in favor of a more lucid pastoral charm, she brought the eighteenth century into the nineteenth with her “inverted mordent” realization of Scarlatti’s trills and the omission of one or both formal repetitions, perhaps as a time-saver for the larger works to come.

In place of the expected Haydn or Beethoven which might have appeared after a Scarlatti appetizer in an old-fashioned New York recital, we were treated to the compact Sixth Sonata (of twelve) by the American Vincent Persichetti, a pillar of the composition scene for over four decades whose music is still far too underplayed. Ms. Sun shines in this Neoclassical terrain and relishes its precision with palpable gusto. The first movement (marked Lightly) chatters up top with run-on dotted rhythms informed neither by the obsessive Romantic Schumann nor by 1940s swing, although Persichetti must have loved both. Ms. Sun brought out just the right bends in tempo while maintaining a delightful sense of humor. Free of resistance, the second movement (Slowly) wends along plaintively, ignoring stable tonal centers as it piles up diatonic harmonies in a pyramid of good-natured fun, like a classic children’s tale. We soon realize that the composer’s joke is on himself, as he marks the third movement Blandly, seemingly instructing the player to navigate compound meter sighs and long treble melismas without emotion—but the game pianist took on the task cleverly and amiably, reserving steam for the fourth movement (Fast) soon to unleash Persichetti’s characteristic whirlwind of colorful passagework. Ms. Sun’s disciplined rhythm allowed us to hear every detail of syncopation and every catch breath.

This is a fine occasion to celebrate Maurice Ravel’s 150^th birthday, and Ms. Sun rounded out the first half of her surprisingly well-proportioned recital with a timely insertion of Ravel’s most popular work (according to the site bachtrack.com, in 2022 La Valse was the most frequently performed classical piece across the globe). Conceived as a symphonic poem and composed in 1919–20, vaguely alluding to the dissolution of Viennese high society (Ravel denied any foreshadowing of European anarchy despite the Great War), the piece was commissioned for the Ballets Russes by Serge Diaghilev, who then refused to choreograph it, calling it a “portrait of ballet.” The composer furnished transcriptions for two pianists and for one, but these keep company with arrangements by manifold artists as diverse as Glenn Gould, Yuja Wang, and Master Sgt. Donald Patterson of the U.S. Marine Band.

The first decision facing any pianist aspiring to play the piece is whether to attempt one of the extant versions or to tinker with them and synthesize something new. As Ms. Sun’s program did not include printed remarks other than her extensive credentials, it is difficult to comment on the edition used, but one cannot argue with one’s own ears, and this performance was the ultimately satisfying result of years of preparation. Ms. Sun knows her strengths: rhythmic construction, accuracy, flexible lines, and transparency of shading; and confidently projects her choices in sound. The swirling mists of Ravel’s annotation would have tended in lesser hands to devolve into chaos, but Ms. Sun succeeded in creating a veritable tsunami of texture while imagining a decadent and infectious 1855 ballroom dance.

Having given her all in the Ravel, Ms. Sun might have called it a night and sent everyone home singing, but the second half held new surprises. A deft touch of aural planning took us not to a typical Chopin nocturne at this point but to the surreal inner thoughts of Benjamin Britten, who composed his Notturno as a set piece for the first Leeds Piano Competition in 1963. The spooky processional quality of the droning bass superimposed with percussive eruptions and Bartókian cricket chirps withdraws all hints of comfort from this dark lullaby. Ms. Sun’s tasteful filigree turned appropriately sinister (perhaps even more so than needed) and settled back into character with the approach of consonance at last, the final eerie notes depressed silently before the release of the damper pedal as indicated by the composer.

Tucked into the hidden recesses of the program’s second half, like gold bars under a mattress, was Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 101, once the cornerstone of Carnegie Hall recitals and the subject of troves of musicology. (After Russell Sherman’s recital in 1984, The New York Times wrote that he played as if he had “felt it as a personal benediction from Beethoven.”) Ms. Sun turned in a neat performance, straightforward and clearcut, evincing minimal struggle and generous varnish. We revisited the pastoral style of her second Scarlatti sonata in the opening movement, and the endless dotted rhythms from the Persichetti sonata, now transposed down the piano in jagged blocks, in the second. Ms. Sun’s facility showed itself to full advantage in the fourth movement with its quirky fugue. Again, all repeat signs were deemed optional and bypassed.

Beethoven’s star pupil, Carl Czerny, earned preeminence from his own firebrand, Franz Liszt, who composed the Paraphrase on Rigoletto in 1855, the year portrayed by Ravel in his composition La Valse. The Verdi-Liszt was therefore a familial program closer, and Ms. Sun was at her best in Liszt’s deceptively simple octave runs and light passagework, particularly in his famous cascading “three-hand” effects. The Duke’s quartet opening “Bella figlia dell’amore” held enough D-flat-major bonhomie to assuage Ravel’s malevolent mists, if they were still with us, and to rock Benjamin Britten back to sleep.

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

“Waldeinsamkeit” (Forest Solitude)

Xiaofu Ju, piano

Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY

May 19, 2024

Writers and composers have celebrated nature and its salubrious effects for many centuries, but the concept of the forest might seem out of keeping with the routine of a metropolitan-dwelling musician, who often spends six hours a day imbibing the solitude of four walls and a piano. To be clear, this recital was neither confined nor ordinary. Xiaofu Ju, a cosmopolitan prizewinner with a burgeoning career in China and across the globe, does not play like a hungry competitor; it took only a matter of seconds onstage for him to tap into the wellspring of his own poetry (of which he has published two volumes) and to find himself at one with space and time in the expansive Zankel Hall.

The theme of the evening (literally, Forest Aloneness) drew references to the German Romantic poets, the art songs of Brahms (In Waldeseinsamkeit, 1878), Richard Wagner (“Waldweben” from Siegfried, 1876), and the Transcendentalist Americans Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Waldeinsamkeit, 1858). Romantic or Post-romantic imagery, and miniatures in particular, provide the strongest lure to Mr. Ju and his artistry. He shines in the magic of the understated, pulling us into his psychological stillness. This would explain his affinity for Leoš Janáček and his choice of V mlhách (In the Mists) as a program opener.

The four Czech pieces from 1912 anticipate the aphoristic style and terse phrasing of Janáček’s operas, with more economy of means and a delicate translucence. Mr. Ju’s passion was controlled as he hovered over gently chiming octaves and repeated notes, abstaining from glamor or generic profundity. Although Janáček composed the set during a bleak period in his life, Mr. Ju’s performance of this and almost every other work on his program explored the more desirable spectrum of brightness and optimism.

His guarded energies continued to bloom ever so slowly in Schumann’s nine Waldszenen, Op. 82, as he focused on floating sound rather than on any emphatic pulsation. We heard few echoes of traditional Germanic motifs but, in their stead, a ghostly, chirping, nearly archless virtuosity marked by spontaneous and unbroken counterpoint. Schumann’s unstable frame of mind in 1848 was refashioned here in the hands and sensibility of a captive narrator, uncluttered by neurosis and basking in pristine reminiscence. Herberge (Wayside Inn, often translated as Shelter) plunged ahead with crisply dotted articulations, and Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet) unfolded with wondrous pedals and streams of color. This poetic recitation suddenly brought to mind the Schumann of a promising young Yuri Egourov from ages past, but with a finer brush stroke.

The woodsy premise of the recital became merely a departure point for free association in the second half, as Mr. Ju transported us to Java with the 1907 Book Two of Claude Debussy’s Images. Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells through the Leaves) might have been a religious vision, such was Mr. Ju’s hypnotic recreation of gamelan timbres which, if placed side by side with French percussion instruments, could have demoted the latter, in Debussy’s words, to “primitive noises at a country fair.” Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the Moon Descends on the Temple That Was) simmered in quiet ecstasy, bringing a palpable hush to Zankel Hall, and the line was finally let out for good in Poissons d’or (Fish of Gold), when Mr. Ju attained the summit of a near-disorienting, effervescent frenzy.

By the time we reached Liszt’s monumental Sonata in B minor, the forest was long gone and we were in the presence of a young man. Mr. Ju’s astonishing command of speed and superhuman discipline could make child’s play of double octaves or fugues, and his gossamer runs of spun silk could show him as master of every degree of pianissimo, but this was a lean Liszt B minor, slightly more attuned to a glorious Sposalizio or large character piece than to a symphonic warhorse. One shudders to contemplate what a few years will do to the apotheosis of Mr. Ju’s recap second theme, as he melds the absolute to the programmatic to the Hungarian, when his career has taken certain flight.

Following a program of such import, the pianist chose for encores Bach’s Chorale Prelude Ich ruf zu dir (arranged by Busoni) and, in what amounted to the highlight of the night, Scriabin’s Sonata No. 4 with its blistering chiaroscuro. The concert was billed by the Paulus Hook Music Foundation as a gesture of Sino-American goodwill. One could not imagine a more benevolent cultural gift.

                                                                                            

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, oboe

Adam Sherkin, piano

Tenri Cultural Institute, New York, NY

April 27, 2024

The Tenri Cultural Institute’s suitability for an ebullient Saturday night recital of living composers’ works included the benefit of bright lighting, the better for digesting fancied-up titles and a ten-page, cell-phone-only program. Canadian pianist Adam Sherkin, the curator of Piano Lunaire (a clever reference to Schoenberg and his mad mascot), named this tenth of eleven concerts for the premiere of his own composition Plastic Dawn, performed at the top of the program. Additional premieres by Mr. Sherkin and his Toronto colleagues were introduced by the composers themselves in attendance or on video projection, and a few oft-performed pieces better known to a niche crowd received their first New York hearings or revivals.

Trained at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, London’s Royal College, and New York’s Mannes College, Mr. Sherkin shows classical restraint giving way to a philosophical propensity for eerie or even frightening images. He explains the symbolism of Plastic Dawn as a series of “manufactured beginnings” that fits nicely with the “Aubade” genre of his solo piano character pieces but leaves many tentative loose ends. Morning motifs abound in the five-movement oboe/piano work, which opens with a free solo oboe cadenza he describes as a sun salutation. The second movement adds choleric jabs and interjections from the piano, continuing its dialectical opposition until the fifth movement resolves all with glassy, transparent serenity in both oboe and piano. Mr. Sherkin’s piano work from 2022-24, New Aubades, flavors its morning coffee not with a primitive asana but with a joyful transformation of Ravel’s Scarbo, evolving from wild tremolos in two hands to short gestures and flashes, to a closing movement titled “Ineo” (literally, I go in [to something new]) in a more objective and comforting style.

At least two other offerings after 2020 share the Covid-laden premonition of apocalypse. The Tender Scars of Memory, published this year by Harry Stafylakis, unfolds nostalgically from a kind of New Age “Greensleeves” in a clearly organic form, with the composer’s characteristic texture of repeated notes influenced by guitar figures and Greek folk music. The score’s tempo directions range from “Something darker is being dredged up” to “Right back where we started,” although the idiomatic writing for both instruments needs no dramatic cues to make its mark. In the Garden of Endless Sleep, a 2020 tapestry by Kevin Lau, employs improvisational polyrhythms, expansive intervals, and recitative rather than cool 9/8 pastoral meters to capture Lau’s own longing and fear of the unknown. Repeated notes here are used as stationary vibrato, the negation of tonality mollified only by the mournful sighs of the oboe. The work’s closing punchline materializes as an A-minor song over the drone of the lowest note on the piano keyboard, with the dreariness of Shostakovich and the soothing regularity of a Bach prelude.

By default, Alexina Louie’s 2012 Filigree became a traditional repertory piece, although its Tenri performance was listed as a first in the U.S. Apart from exotic instrumental timbres, pedaling, and minimalist reiterations of broken clusters, Asian influences were not as apparent here as in some of Ms. Louie’s other works. Particularly memorable were the surreal opening, a transformation of Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige, the interplay of synthetic scales and fantastic dance rhythms, and the tribute to Messiaen’s Vingt regards in the piano’s magical treble sonorities near the end. A silly encore, Alex Shapiro’s Brat, left us with a touch of humor after the evening’s probing excursions into metaphysics.

At face value as an oboe/piano recital of new music, this successful concert received a rightfully deserved, heartfelt response from Tenri fans, who listened acutely to the latest installment of Mr. Sherkin’s cryptic programming. The playing was elegant and effective, taking advantage of the gallery’s immediate acoustic presence and luminous space with varied articulations, melismatic flourishes (Ms. Broms-Jacobs), growling chromaticism and pointillistic chimes (Mr. Sherkin), and visceral harmonic progressions that always moved forward and never settled into cinematic cliché. Ms. Broms-Jacobs showed her true colors as a principal orchestral player from Manitoba and Winnipeg by delivering a rhythmically crafted, supremely reliable part that was easy to follow and lyrical against the backdrop of every pianistic trick. Overbalancing of piano (conquering oboe) was, actually, an issue, perhaps attributable to where the oboist was standing or to the hall itself, or to the long piano stick.

The concert might have been equally enjoyable with a shorter set of written notes. The advertised “Pre-show chat” from 7:30 to 8:00 unfortunately referred only to the murmur of attendees in the foyer. The external enigma of the evening was Tenri’s presumed need to fill our ears with background jazz recordings while wine and snacks were served.

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

Twelve Preludes and Fugues (Nos. 13–24), Book II from

24 Preludes and Fugues, op. 87 – Dmitri Shostakovich

Regina Shenderovich, piano

Marc A Scorca Hall, The National Opera Center, New York, NY

March 8, 2024

Eventbrite advertising drew a small but attentive group of listeners to Marc A. Scorca Hall on March 8^th for a rare treat: a performance of the second volume of Preludes and Fugues by Dmitri Shostakovich, a documentary project reserved for pianists of exemplary mettle and inner strength. The success of such an undertaking in a live concert also involves forging a delicate sense of trust with the audience, who must process complicated (although beautiful) details for more than eighty minutes without intermission. The pianist Regina Shenderovich, self-reliant and supremely up to the task, sat at the side of the stage until concert time, introduced her own program chattily without a shred of nervousness, and turned her own pages, emerging at the end of this test of fire as fresh as if she could quite happily have repeated the show.

Would that the life of the composer had been so unafflicted. Shostakovich spent his days in apprehensive contemplation of the fate that would befall him if the authorities should deem his music offensive or “formalist,” worthy of political imprisonment or even execution if he overstepped arbitrary creative boundaries. The favorite aesthetic insult could be interpreted and manipulated by any committee of bureaucrats; but a direct phone call from Joseph Stalin to Shostakovich overrode all threats when the Soviet Union needed a spokesperson at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York in 1949. Shostakovich complied and was safe, but never recovered from his psychological scars.

The 24 Preludes and Fugues were written in 1950‐51 for the young Tatyana Nikolayeva, winner of the bicentennial International Bach Competition in 1950. Nikolayeva performed them until the very end of her life, from memory and in pairs of concerts. In 1993, I flocked to the 92^nd Street Y with a cohort of students to sit bravely through both concerts of one cycle, sheepishly realizing that some preparation might have illuminated this transformative experience. Two weeks later, Nikolayeva left our world, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while performing the Preludes and Fugues in San Francisco.

The individual pieces, modelled on the much shorter originals of J. S. Bach, are organized not in rising half tones but in the manner of Chopin’s Preludes, by ascending fifths and relative minor keys. They are an effective staple of the repertoire of students and concert artists and satisfy expressive as well as mathematical cravings. Presented as a collection, they are more forbidding. The first fugue of the second book, near the outset of the concert, is a five-voice challenge in F-sharp major. Shostakovich alludes constantly to Bach while venturing into the ethos of the postwar (and Cold War) Soviet Union, with a churning, punctuated waltz (D-flat major), tremolo figures and monolithic church themes (E-flat minor), giddy passagework in every range of the keyboard (B-flat major), and Brucknerian architecture building to a cataclysmic eruption of reinforced octaves (D minor), in a cathartic climax that could incite an instant standing ovation if played to a full house.

Ms. Shenderovich hails from St. Petersburg’s Special Music School via Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Illinois. She bears an unusual likeness to the youthful Nikolayeva. An artist of prodigious musical resources, she brings out the fluidity of lines with sophisticated textural layering, subordinating basses to an infinitely colored right hand, and launching into pyrotechnical finger-twisters without fear. Particularly memorable were F minor with its poignant major/minor thirds à la Josquin, and dreamy F major with its Bach transcription-like sincerity and optimism. Where Nikolayeva capitalized on an imposing authority, Ms. Shenderovich lets us know we are always in good hands but never oversells her wares. She has a promising future with this tour de force if she decides to invest the time to memorize a daunting program, and if she can find a brilliant publicist.

Steering clear of the darkness and pessimism in the Preludes and Fugues may have obliterated traces of irony and sarcasm essential to Shostakovich, but at the same time Ms. Shenderovich appeared to be healing his pathological undertones with a much-needed, soothing balm.

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

Jiwon Han, piano

Chopin–Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, op. 52

Chopin–Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, op. 60

Liszt–Sonata in B minor, S. 178

Stravinsky–Three Movements from Petrushka

Isang Yun–Five Pieces for Piano (1958)

Recorded at Yagi Studio, Seoul, Korea, 2014

Fortified with two performance degrees and an artist diploma from South Korea, a second artist diploma from Cincinnati, two doctorates in piano from Michigan State University, and an admirable list of prizes, recordings, and jobs as conductor, educator, and collaborative artist, Jiwon Han should have little need to prove his status as an expert in the field. Judging from his album “Jiwon Han—Début,” recorded nine years ago at the age of twenty-seven, we can already hear Mr. Han’s formative tastes spanning the range of pianistic warhorses, pieces which define the real article and demand the utmost of a performer. These audio files present the young, pre-Doctor Han as a probing yet conservative virtuoso steering all ears toward an eminent future.

The chronological arrangement of the YouTube playlist, Jiwon Han—Début , begins in 1842 with rather late Chopin, although one could only imagine the effect of Mr. Han’s incisive fingers on a Baroque or Classic masterwork (perhaps something to anticipate in another release). Meticulous to a fault in the preparation of every musical detail, he squeezes the last drop of tone from each voice in Chopin’s multi-layered counterpoint and leaves no note to speculation. The poetic genesis of the Fourth Ballade is nascent and the woven, operatic gondola songs of the Barcarolle, among Chopin’s last and most reflective experiments in sound, are given highly burnished treatment marked by discipline and unflinching concentration. To be sure, audio engineering and the YouTube format place us in a digital environment quite different from that of a concert hall—which would not jostle our meditations with jingles and blaring ads—but the “acoustic” is somewhat distant, treble-centric, and wet, even when Mr. Han seems to be pouring both hands into a chordal tirade. Liszt’s symphonic and tumultuous B minor Sonata unfolds acrobatically yet earnestly, pacing out the glorious arrivals of second themes and fugal upheavals with an almost micro-managed conductor’s sense of time. We marvel at Mr. Han’s power and facility while we search for a trace of the Hungarian rhapsodist who would transmute absolute structure and tonality within several years of the Sonata’s publication in 1854. Perhaps owing to the limitation of computer speakers and the sprinkling of commercial breaks between sections of this one-movement traversal of the human spirit, Mr. Han’s assiduous interpretation leaves us longing to hear him live, in a setting in which we might actually hold our breath.

Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka becomes an instant magnet for Jiwon Han, who recorded the three excerpts at nearly the same age as the composer of the original ballet (Stravinsky was twenty-eight in 1910 when he realized his orchestral vision of a magician instilling human energy and emotion into puppets). Indeed, the piano suddenly leaps into the room as Mr. Han conjures a model soundscape of electric octaves, staccatissimo accents, and carnival folk themes. His superb rhythmic articulation and dry ostinato, so well matched to the exacting style of the regimented Russian, could be lifted into a freshly choreographed performance if Vaslav Nijinsky’s mocking reincarnation were to reappear onscreen, as Petrushka’s ghost hovered over the stage at the end of the Shrovetide Fair scene in the ballet. A pianist, however, as the sole element absent a full tableau, must be set designer, theatrical costumer, director, and choreographer, and in this regard, we hear Mr. Han’s neoclassic character primed to discover more Slavic savagery and sheer zaniness in his brilliant playing.

In a surprising detour from the showy persona exemplified by the rest of his program, Mr. Han ends on an unsettled note, with the expressionist Korean-German Isang Yun’s Five Pieces for Piano, or Fünf Stücke für Klavier. These comprise the earliest work of a Korean-born composer who studied in Japan, Paris, and Berlin and befriended Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen in his quest for the unification of Eastern and Western styles. In 1958, before his political imprisonment and voiced strivings for the reconciliation of North and South Korea, Isang Yun was influenced by a mix of twelve-tone serialism, Taoist naturalism, Buddhist chants, and Korean instrumental timbres. It is to his credit that Mr. Han champions such mathematically constructed and intricate music. The five pieces evoke strains of Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, op. 25 and Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux, with new ideas: extreme curves of high and low register, colorful grace notes, imitations of vibrato, glissando, and pizzicato techniques, and fortississimo or pianississimo fermatas as isolated sounds trailing off into silence. Mr. Han portrays the contrasts effectively and freely. There may be an even higher level of control indicated by the composer’s careful progression of rhythmic values (triplets, quintuplets, septuplets) that could warrant a sense of restraint in the performer’s instinctively Romantic rubato, but the result is dramatic and alluring.

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

“Nacht und Träume”

Juhee Lim, piano

Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY

October 6, 2022

The typical trajectory of a wunderkind’s career—the firebrand phase of blazing confidence opening the door to a slow infusion of poetry and psychological depth—has been turned on its head by the high stakes of joining today’s music profession. Pianist Juhee Lim, at age twenty-two, sponsored by the Sejong Soloists and the Samsung Foundation of Culture, began her Weill Recital Hall program Thursday night with a requiem and visions of death in Lera Auerbach’s searing 1992 triptych, Memento mori. The raw intensity of Ms. Lim’s statement bypassed all pianistic pleasantries and underscored the ironic double meaning of the concert’s title, “Nacht und Träume.” Far from a tribute to a familiar Schubert Lied about peaceful slumber, the symbolism here was of death, nightmares, and dwindling hope. (Is this the horizon on which a modern creative artist must gaze?) Despair hovers around us—this month marks the centenary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to follow the poetic tangent further. Perhaps Ms. Lim’s philosophical icebreaker was just an impressive warm-up, but the message hit home.

The other two works of the evening, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Brahms’s Sonata in F minor, Op. 5, presented more literary nocturnal associations (water spirits, a hanging corpse, goblins, twilight) and assuaged the realism of Ms. Lim’s opening gambit by returning us, in reverse chronological order, to a more traditional world with which we could cope.

The diminutive Juhee Lim is a colossal pianist with a palette of ten thousand colors. She revels in drama, delicacy, rhetorical outbursts, and sophisticated handling of time and silence. A veteran soloist, having received engagements with the Mariinsky Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic, and the Juilliard Orchestra, among others, Ms. Lim showed no barrier of nerves and plunged straight into her work. Her feather-lightness and faultlessly articulated double notes in Ravel’s Ondine may have been magnified by the easy brightness of the Steinway in the completely full Weill Hall. The morbid theme of the evening continued with the stock-still gallows motif of Le gibet and reached its zenith in Scarbo with its trembling repeated notes and welling-up of passionate ninth chords, all performed with integrity and reserves of stamina.

Ms. Lim’s penchant for muscular majesty encountered a different sort of Everest to scale in the Brahms Sonata. In her hands, this “absolute” music (which does not actually depict anything, although the poetic quote about twilight in Jane Vial Jaffe’s beautiful program essay makes for nice inclusion in the dream sequence) veered daringly close to the aesthetic line famously drawn by Eduard Hanslick in the Romantic Brahms-Liszt divide. Ms. Lim’s coy-to-ferocious character changes and liberally pedalled cadences seemed more evocative of Schumann’s wild Florestan than of the fledgling Brahms who played his new sonata for Schumann at the age of twenty, and inner voices which are often given a sonorous treatment resembled ethereal, post-Romantic filigree. (Premonitions of Ms. Lim’s future performance of a Liszt Sonata came to mind.) A stylishly Viennese Scherzo movement and allusions to the mature Brahms’s A German Requiem recapped the thesis of the concert. For any listeners still pining for a soothing Schubert song as promised in the recital’s billing, his G-flat Impromptu from Opus 90 was an ultimately fulfilling encore.

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

1. Debussy: Minstrels, No. 12 from Préludes, Book 1, L. 117
2. Grieg: Sonata in E Minor, op. 7 (II. Andante molto)
3. Haydn: Sonata in B Minor, Hob. XVI:32 (I. Allegro moderato)
4. Ravel: Sonatine, M. 40 (I. Modéré)
5. Jessup: Le revenant
6. Mozart: Concerto No. 19 in F Major, K. 459 (III. Allegro assai), Ben Rhee, Camerata Artists Orchestra

Recorded at Oktaven Audio, New York (1–4), live at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall (5), live at Merkin Concert Hall (6)

Immediacy is the new gold standard. Never mind preening or buying tickets to an exciting début recital at Weill Hall. Now the piano recital comes to you, the program has been pared to its standout moments, and for 99 cents you can own one piece.

The promising 23-year-old American artist Christopher Jessup, a recent Juilliard graduate, takes full advantage of everything technology has to offer. In a smorgasbord of divine sound bites, Mr. Jessup introduces us to a 28-minute playlist of the pieces he delivers as well as anyone: Debussy’s “Minstrels,” the slow movement of Grieg’s Piano Sonata, opening movements of Haydn and Ravel, an original composition, and the Finale of a Mozart concerto with orchestra. The playlist comprises six audio YouTube links showing a profile of Mr. Jessup on the screen, with the exception of track 3, an actual (and very welcome) performance video in a drawing room filled with books. The selections are available for purchase: To purchase on Amazon  To purchase on iTunes

Mr. Jessup’s playing is refined and eloquent in all of the styles he presents here. It is refreshing to witness the first act of a career which does not seem to indulge in virtuosic daredevilry, and although the artist is still searching for his special strength in a varied program overflowing with creative ideas, it may be safe to assume that he will sidestep pure athleticism as he gains wider recognition. His exquisite pacing is never beat-bound, he listens intently for balance and sound quality, and he is not afraid to pull the tempo along as the architecture of each piece unfolds. His expert training in composition not only allows him the freedom to immerse himself directly into the character of each paragraph he utters, but also affords his audience a glimpse of a new actor in that panoply of composer-performers who have shaped the pianistic idiom through the eras. The enthusiastic cadenza of the Mozart Concerto’s third movement which follows Jessup’s original work, Le revenant (The Undead? We would love explanatory notes!), shows us a more traditional version of the pianist’s love of improvisation.

At his best in capricious, spontaneous gestures, exaggerating the flexion of the raised musical eyebrow, Christopher Jessup uses his fine aural conception to lead us smoothly from manic to morose and toward the hyperactive once more, albeit in quizzical fashion. This play of opposites already has established itself in Jessup’s consciousness and in our own, as he traces an odd reverse chronology: from the comical face of Debussy in 1910 back to the Norwegian folk-influenced Edvard Grieg in 1866, to the arch-Classical Haydn of 1775, suddenly parachuting us forward again to France at the turn of the 20^th century, and so on. If the artist has a plan, it is to ask for philosophical cohesion amid an oxymoronic batch of dissociated thinkers. But it is far more likely that he has not worried about the jarring juxtaposition of musical appetizers which lack a main course, and this may not be a productive path as he navigates the concert world.

In keeping with our consumeristic trends, radio stations often use the fallacy of listeners’ abhorrence of empty space to skip movements or delay announcements of titles, shifting images in such a neurological shuffle that listeners become gradually disoriented. The playlist may be a background for other comfortable activities: running, cooking, waiting for customer support. In Mr. Jessup’s demo, even the composers’ names are deemed peripheral, leaving audiophiles to guess them and puzzle over Le revenant,  whose composer, as performer, is almost hidden in plain sight. When one factors in YouTube’s frequent interruptions for ads, Amazon’s running mashup of non sequitur samples, and the absence of program notes on these sites, the result is a rather trivial treatment for a musician who most certainly should be given our serious attention.

by Emily White  for New York Concert Review; New York, NY