Pianist Sunwoo Yekwon's new album explores kinship between Liszt, Schubert

For most of his 20s, pianist Sunwoo Yekwon did not play the works of Franz Liszt. 

He had only played the composer’s pieces — notorious for their complexity — as a middle school student in the way that precocious players often do, forcing themselves to practice “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” (1851) or “Dante Sonata” (1856) to prove that they can overcome the difficulty. 

But somewhere along the way to Juilliard, the Mannes School of Music and Berlin, Sunwoo stopped playing Liszt. The decision wasn’t purposeful; instead, it simply reflected his lack of interest in the composer. 

“I didn’t even think about playing Liszt until recently,” he said at a press conference in Yeouido, western Seoul, on Thursday.

However, the pianist has built his third Decca Records studio album, released on Thursday, around the composer. The national tour for the album opens at the Yangsan Culture-art Center on Saturday and closes at the Seoul Arts Center on May 30.

Intravenous stops include Iksan, Daegu, Seongnam, Changwon and Ulsan, a route familiar to anyone who has tracked Sunwoo since his Van Cliburn International Piano Competition win in 2017, when he became the first Korean to earn the medal.

Through the album, Sunwoo covertly explores the reason behind his newfound interest in Liszt. What had changed was his own interpretation of Liszt’s sound — and how this shift affected the meaning that the composer’s music holds for him.

“The weight of the sound is a little lighter, a little more floaty,” he said, reaching for visual imagery as he described how he approached Liszt’s works. “Like soap bubbles or a clean, transparent piece of glass. A very fine wineglass.”

The album — recorded at the Jesus Christ Church in Berlin’s Dahlem district, where Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan made many of his late recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic — is structured around the idea of “singing on the piano,” according to Sunwoo.

Liszt’s transcriptions of Franz Schubert’s lieder, or music set to poetry, sit alongside opera paraphrases and Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1” (1859), with “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” as what Sunwoo calls a grand finale. The pianist’s recitals pair the Liszt piece with Schubert’s 1828 sonata No. 20 in A major — a coupling that, on the surface, looks like contrast, but that Sunwoo insists is a kinship. Schubert is the creator of the “inner” voice; Liszt is the one who takes that voice and dramatizes it.

Asked about returning to a composer he had played as a teenager, Sunwoo was wry and reflective. He has no recording from those years, but if he listened back, he suspected he would hear something technically refined, but not much more.

“That was it. My playing of Liszt back then [was] only clean and accurate,” Sunwoo said. “That’s all music is until it isn’t. I have learned to put more emotion into my playing, to play from feeling.”

The shift traces back to a moment in his late teens, after he had gone to the United States to study and begun working with chamber musicians and singers. Sunwoo had been a gifted student who had not yet learned to feel music in his heart. Then, one day, he stumbled on a piece by Schubert, “Die schöne Müllerin” (1823), and he has never quite played the same way since. Schubert remains his favorite composer.

Asked whether he hoped audiences would discover a “new” Liszt, Sunwoo balked. He did not particularly like using “new” as a frame for his music.

“The same piece feels different depending on the life you breathe into it,” he said.

He played the third movement of the Schubert sonata as a single arc this time — like “pulling slowly on a thick rubber band” to let the resistance build.

The description for this method doubles as a description for the album. The two halves of the program of the recitals — Liszt and Schubert — are meant to be heard as one continuous breath, the lyricism and the explosion as parts of the same pull. Whether the audiences who follow him through six cities this month hear it that way, Sunwoo said, is ultimately up to them.

Tickets for Sunwoo’s upcoming recital range from 40,000 won to 100,000 won ($28 to $69). More information on each program can be found at the websites of the venues, including the Seoul Arts Center.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]