Pianist Yeol Eum Son launches her spring with a month of major debuts, tours and returns. She begins March on tour to Austria with Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich and conductor Yutaka Sado. She will perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 at the St Pölten’s Festspielhaus (3 March) and Vienna’s Musikverein (4 March). She then returns to the iconic Casa de Música in the Portuguese capital of the north, Oporto, for her debut collaboration with the Orquesta Sinfónica do Porto to perform Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. This concerto debut with the orchestra on Saturday, 8 March, follows her recital debut at the concert hall in May 2021. Yeol Eum then rejoins the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich and Sado to perform the Mozart at Basingstoke’s Anvil Arts (12 March), and London’s Cadogan Hall (13 March). This final concert of the tour marks her third appearance at Cadogan Hall, following her acclaimed debut there in April 2018 with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.
Yeol Eum then returns to the US make her debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. She will perform Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Sz. 119, BB. 127 with the orchestra and conductor Roberto González-Monjas on 22 March at the Music Center at Strathmore and 23 March at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. She closes her month in recital at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater on 31 March, performing works by Bendel, Viardot, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Beethoven.
Poetic elegance, an innate feeling for expressive nuance and the power to project bold, dramatic contrasts are among the arresting attributes of Yeol Eum Son’s pianism. Her refined artistry rises from breathtaking technical control and a profound empathy for the emotional temper of the works within her strikingly wide repertoire. She is driven above all by her natural curiosity to explore a multitude of musical genres and styles and the desire to reveal what she describes as the “pure essence” of everything she performs. Yeol Eum refuses to impose limits on her artistic freedom and remains determined to explore new artistic territory. Her choice of repertoire, which spans everything from the works of Bach and Mozart to those of Shchedrin and Kapustin, is guided chiefly by the quality and depth of the music.
In addition to her March highlights, this season Yeol Eum makes orchestral debuts with the BBC Symphony at the Barbican Centre in London, Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra at the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Galicia Symphony Orchestra, Naples Philharmonic, St. Louis, Colorado, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She also returns to the NAC Ottawa, Scottish Chamber and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
“Son lists all the Mozart concertos in her repertoire, and it’s easy to see why. She delivered a captivating performance of the wonderful K. 466 in a felicitous matchup of soloist, conductor, and orchestra. Her patrician elegance and clean, sharply chiselled performance were exemplary. Here was Mozart for a modern instrument orchestra and a modern piano, but very much in the spirit of Mozart’s era.” – David Gordon Duke, Vancouver Sun
Watch Yeol Eum Son’s performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – viewed more than 24 million times – on YouTube