A decade of Mahler closes with an ‘eternal song’ for conductor Chin Sol

Up until the day before Chin Sol conducted Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7, the conductor could see question marks hovering over her musicians’ heads. The Seventh is the Mahler symphony Korean orchestras tend to leave alone, simply because it is the hardest, and the young players of her Mahlerian Orchestra were still visibly puzzled over it in the final rehearsals.

“I was worried. What do we do with this?” Chin recalled during a roundtable interview with reporters at a venue in Seocho District, southern Seoul, on Oct. 1. “Then, strangely, on the day of the concert, the question marks became exclamation marks.”

On Friday, Chin will lead the same orchestra in Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” at Lotte Concert Hall in Seoul, closing a cycle of all of Mahler’s symphonies that she began in 2017.

No privately run orchestra in Korea has done this before. The series has moved at roughly one installment a year, with 2021 lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, and this year it doubled up, with the Eighth, the “Symphony of a Thousand,” in April.

Friday’s Second will put more than 100 musicians on stage alongside a combined choir of about 120 from three ensembles. At 39, Chin is the youngest woman in the world to complete the full cycle of Mahler’s symphonies, according to the International Gustav Mahler Society.

“I honestly never dreamed I would make it this far,” Chin said. “Rather than applauding the person I am now, I want to applaud the younger me who was brave enough to start this in the first place.”

That younger self grew up in a musical household and studied conducting at the Korea National University of the Arts and then in Mannheim, Germany, under Klaus Arp.

“Nearly 20 years ago, when I started conducting, even my parents didn’t assume a woman could become a conductor at such a young age,” she said.

By the time Chin founded the orchestra in 2016, in her late 20s and fresh from Europe, the climate had loosened somewhat. That didn’t fully mean that expectations had risen, however. People were sure she would quit. Proving them wrong was part of why Chin kept going.

“I wanted to throw out a message: If someone like me can do it, who couldn’t?” she said.

Gender was only half of it. Korean classical music fixates on teenage prodigies, and players who pass 20 unannointed often lose heart.

“In more conservative corners, there’s this feeling that only the chosen, raised up by someone else’s backing, get to grow,” Chin said. “But past your mid-20s, past 30, it still comes down to believing in yourself and not letting go.”

The orchestra’s early makeup worked around a lack of a budget. Half the players were amateurs, who paid to sit beside professionals much as they might pay for lessons; the professionals, in turn, were paid fees.

Asked what has changed in the decade since she founded the orchestra, Chin named the composer before herself. At first Mahler was an idol, all heavy philosophy and self-scrutiny. Then came 10 years of digging into him “almost like a madman.”

“It became like writing a dissertation,” Chin reflected. “Now I can say Mahler and I are fairly close.”

On why Mahler cycles always draw attention, Chin turned the question away from herself. Ask why the youngest to finish a Mahler cycle should be a woman, or someone from Asia, or someone young at all, and you arrive at the fact that the cycle has long functioned as a badge of authority, according to Chin.

The symphonies need enormous forces without being crowd-pleasers, which means money and a work force that few can command. Chin had none of that in mind when she founded the orchestra.

“For better or worse, Mahler packed his whole life into the music,” Chin said.

Her pitch for her own orchestra followed from there.

“There’s no rule that music a young Mahler wrote has to be played by people in their 50s,” she said.

Chin has titled the final concert "Ewiger Gesang," or "eternal song" in German, for an ending that leaves something unfinished behind.

Conducting Mahler compositions has never been Chin’s only job. She runs Flasic, a platform for game and subculture music that has staged officially licensed concerts of Pokémon, Civilization and StarCraft, and she served as a classical music adviser on the 2023 tvN drama “Maestra.”

Chin also teaches at her alma mater, sits on the Arts Council Korea and, from this year, is the resident artistic director of an international music festival in Palermo, Sicily. She was also the recipient of the Hong Jin-ki Creator Award, presented by the Joongang Hwadong Foundation, an affiliate of the Korea JoongAng Daily, in the Culture and Arts category in 2024.

What comes after Mahler, she could not say.

“I’m not ready to say goodbye to Mahler quite yet,” she said. Her ongoing Requiem project, which pairs works for the dead by different composers, will continue. As for Friday’s last performance of the Mahler cycle, she expects to cry once the last chord fades.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]