May 2, 2025
Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall
New York City, New York – USA
Yekwon Sunwoo, piano.
R. SCHUMANN: Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
CHOPIN: Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, Op. 60
C. SCHUMANN: Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann
RACHMANINOFF: Moments musicaux
Ben Gambuzza | 5 MAY 2025
I was in a horrible mood. Then, I heard Yekwon Sunwoo.
I awoke Friday morning with my brows already furrowed in frustration because I dreamt I had to take, then retake, the SAT. Then, my hard drive bit the dust, so I had to drop $1000 on a new laptop. Then, I tripped up the stairs at home. Then, I was starving, so I ate a Mediterranean meat pie. I was still starving, but now with the added bonus that my breath smelled and tasted horrific. Then, the Carnegie Hall staff was, as always, rude. I was expecting that some Schumann (both Robert and Clara), Chopin, and Rachmaninoff could be a diversion from my misery, but not an antidote to it.
Sunwoo hasn’t been on my radar. That’s probably because, for the last three years, I’ve been too busy rewatching Yunchan Lim, his compatriot and fellow Cliburn Competition winner, play Rach 3 on YouTube until I’ve cried myself dry. After hearing Sunwoo Friday evening, if I had to choose—as I feel compelled to do, even if one isn’t justified in doing so, amidst this worldwide obsession with everything Korean—my heart is still loyal to Lim.
But Sunwoo’s way of connecting with listeners is special. And the enthusiasm of his majority-Korean audience, at a sold-out Zankel Hall, was convincing.
A magic thread between musician and audience showed itself right before the second encore—perhaps the most beautiful rendition of Claire de Lune I’ve ever heard, evocative not so much of a blue moonlight as of velvet-wrapped rain drops. After the first encore—a milky and personal interpretation of Liszt’s transcription of Robert Schumann’s Widmung—Sunwoo walked back on stage, sat down at the piano, and said, “It’s a long evening, so this is last.” The audience laughed. Then, smiling, he announced, “Claire de Lune,” and the crowd aahed in sweet familiarity. We all proceeded to sigh as Sunwoo caressed the opening minor-thirds like he was making our beds, smoothing the comforter, fluffing the pillows.
The rest of the concert was Romantic-heavy and, to be honest, a little too much to bear. Maybe I was just spent from enduring Schumann’s Fantasie in C at the get-go. Sunwoo’s wild rubato throughout the piece made me remember that not all rubati are created equally, and that, with Schumann, you have to give yourself over to fancy if, for example, you want his several modulations of the same theme to have spice. This, Sunwoo did with tasteful abandon, even if that meant his play with the rhythm in the march-like second section made the tune un-marchable. I like to have a little march in my marches, even if they’re not meant to be marched to.
But march tempi are trifles compared to the way Sunwoo let the overtones resonate at the end of the chorale passage—which he somehow played sotto voce—or the way the look and taste of pink and blue cotton candy suddenly coated my retinae and mouth in phantom sugar as his broken seventh-chords, in triplets, crept up the keyboard to meet the descending melodic line; or how, toward the end of the piece, his unison arpeggios turned into melodies.
My gold-standard for Chopin’s Barcarolle is Michelangeli, which might surprise fans who know him primarily for his Scarlatti and Debussy. But there’s something about the focus of a technician, the control of a Ferrari driver, of—how Stravinsky once described Ravel’s music—the precision of a Swiss clockmaker, that makes his Barcarolle so immediate and bare. Sunwoo’s playing of it—which in fact began during the tail-end of the audience’s applause for the Schumann (a showman’s show of confidence that I can’t help but admire)—was more dancy, truer to the lazy air around a Venetian gondolier than I’m used to. Here, thanks to Sunwoo’s intervention, was Chopin at his most inviting, least demanding, coolest. In the words of my seatmate, a clarinetist: “it flowed.”
I asked the same seatmate how she liked Sunwoo’s playing of Clara Schumann’s Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann. She said she liked it much better than the Fantasie because it was more feminine. I said, “Yeah, but what does that even mean?” Well, I know—everybody knows—what it means: lighter, more reserved, not as loud. And yet I found Sunwoo’s Variations to be none of these. In fact, the whole time I was thinking, “This sounds more like Brahms than Schumann.” The fact that I even had to comprehend Clara’s music by drawing analogy to a male composer is evidence, I guess, that we (or is it just me?) have difficulty accepting a woman’s music on her own terms.
But accepting Clara’s music on Sunwoo’s terms was easy enough, since his way of carrying the theme through registers in variations that spanned the keyboard, and his subtle attunement to how dissonant chords can, with the right pedaling, nonetheless resonate with each other, were proofs that Sunwoo himself approaches Clara’s music on her own terms. He recognized Clara’s classicism—a key marker of difference between the couple’s compositional styles.
Rachmaninoff’s Moments musicaux should be called Moments momentous, or however you say “momentous musical moments” in French, since every one of the six pieces could stand on its own. This was where Sunwoo’s passion became overwrought, as indicated, perhaps, in how he—audibly breathing and grunting in sympathetic agony—missed the high notes of the first iterations of calls-and-responses in the “Presto in E minor.” I thanked God for a break in the din in the form of the “Andante cantabile in B minor” and the “Adagio sostenuto in D-flat Major,” both of which Sunwoo played with the depth of twenty-thousand leagues and the bittersweet remembrance of one’s far-off homeland.
When I got onto the train platform to go home, I heard a busking violinist playing Satie, and I realized that my woes had vanished, even as my bad breath remained. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Yekwon Sunwoo: yekwonsunwoo.com
- Carnegie Hall: carnegiehall.org
Read more by Ben Gambuzza.
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