Creative Classical Music Management presents Jungwon Sun in Review
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 150th 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.
