Yeol Eum Son’s new album, featuring Ravel’s two piano concertos and Paul Wittgenstein’s left-hand arrangements of four pieces by Bach, is out now on Naïve. Son is joined by musical director Anja Bihlmaier and musicians of the Residentie Orkest The Hague.
For Son, Ravel’s Concertos evokes the horrors of the Great War as much as a moment in her country’s history, the wars that shook the European continent at the beginning of the 20th century echoing her nation’s first independence movements.
In the form of a postlude, the four pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach presented here in arrangements for the left hand alone by Paul Wittgenstein, form more than an escape. They constitute, after the horrors of the destruction, the real moment of reparation.
A few months after finishing his famous Boléro, Maurice Ravel set himself a new challenge: to bring together the two instruments that have always been at the heart of his main occupations, the piano and the orchestra. Two commissioners would ultimately help him: Serge Koussevitzky, the head of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and ardent advocate of the music of his time, for whom Ravel would conceive the Concerto in G major, and Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist born in Vienna in 1887 who, since losing his right hand on the front during a Russian offensive on Poland, had worked to develop the repertoire dedicated to the left hand alone.
She will be celebrating the release of the recording with a tour with Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra and conductor Alexander Shelley at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre (14 and 15 May); and in the Republic of Korea’s Busan’s Citizen’s Hall (29 May), Gumi Art Centre (30 May) and Seoul Arts Centre (31 May). She will also perform works from the album with the Brussels Philharmonic and conductor Lio Kuokman at the Festival Musiq3 on 29 June.