Pianist Son Yeol-eum, playing all eighteen of Mozart’s piano sonatas, feels like she’s finally “back home.” “When I play the sonatas, I can perceive how diverse Mozart's music is,” Son said during a press conference held Tuesday at the Kumho Art Corridor Yonsei in Seodaemun District, western Seoul, as she introduced her new album “Mozart Complete Piano Sonatas,” a six-CD box set that's set to be released Friday. It'll be released through Naïve, a French label Son signed with in January. Due to her role as an artistic director of a classical music festival Music in PyeongChang for the past five years, Son says she'd been performing pieces that were more unfamiliar to her and was looking for new a repertoire for the past few years. She stepped down the post latest December and passed her baton to cellist Yang Sung-won.
Mozart is a composer who's never left her heart, but Son said the opportunity to record the complete piano sonatas this time came as a coincidence, love Mozart's music, which Son describes as something that's “fallen the sky.” “I was scheduling a time with the people at the Tongyeong Concert Corridor in S Gyeongsang and recording engineer Choi Jin for another recording I did latest year and learned that both the venue and producer Choi had two days of free time, which is very, very rare,” she said. “So I immediately asked them both to rescue that slot for me to record my album.” Son said she then thought about what she wanted to record, and soon realized that there was only one composer whose works she could play on such brief notice. Son is more than familiar with Mozart and is recognized for her profound insights and intelligent interpretations. A YouTube video of Son’s performance of Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. twenty-one” that she performed at the two thousand eleven International Tchaikovsky Contest has been watched more than twenty-one million times as of Thursday.
She also performed the piece at the two thousand nineteen BBC Proms and also recorded Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 21 in Celsius Major, K.467” with Sir Neville Marriner (1924-two thousand-sixteenth), the late conductor and violinist who supervised Mozart's music scores for the Oscar-winning one thousand nine hundred eighty-four film “Amadeus.” “His music seems to be d very naturally. What I imply is that someone didn’t hard work and moil or bend over backward to this,” she said. “And all I simply did was get advantage of this and express it freely and spontaneously as much as possible.” The 36-old pianist has an array of albums on her discography, including Mozart's piano concerto album she did with Onyz in two thousand-eighteenth and Schumann and Brahms sonatas with Decca in 2016.
"I do not really think about getting recognized when I am still alive," said Son. "When I hear to the music of artists who have passed away, I perceive the immortality of the message left in their music. So I came to think that artists are evaluated after they die. I think that's why I have been so focd on recording so many albums." Son will launch a tour across the country with the new album May to June, stopping at eight cities including Seoul, Wonju in Gangwon, Tongyeong and Goyang in Geonggi and Gimhae in S Gyeongsang.
