Yeol Eum Son releases Love Music with violinist Svetlin Roussev on Naïve. The album, which features music by Waxman, Korngold, Kreisler, Richard Strauss and Wagner is available for streaming now. The recording is available on CD now in France and will be released around the world throughout March. Click here to listen and buy.
Yeol Eum, who was recently named an Apple Music Classical Ambassador for South Korea, and Svetlin celebrate the release with a series of duo recitals in Korea. They will perform Korngold’s Four Pieces from the Incidental Music to William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”, Op. 11, Fauré’s Sonata for Violin and Piano no.1 in A Major, Op.13, Waxman’s “Love Music” Paraphrase based on R. Wagner’s Opera “Tristan & Isolde” and Richard Strauss’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 18 at the Miryang Arirang Art Centre on 23 March, Lotte Concert Hall in Seoul on 25 March, Suseong Artpia in Daegu on 27 March and Arts Centre Incheon on 30 March.
Naïve writes:
Following her lyrical and witty complete recording of Mozart’s Keyboard Sonatas, issued by naïve in March 2023, Yeol Eum Son invites Svetlin Roussev to join her in the enticingly subtle harmonic intricacies of Germanic post-Romanticism.
For their second recital as a duo, they follow the course taken by works written over a period of slightly more than half a century by composers or famous performers upon whom Richard Wagner exercised crucial influence. They take on almost every genre – cinema, opera, chamber music, transcription – treating it in the lyrical, large-scale manner of the Bayreuth master. During their unexpected, fascinating journey, Yeol Eum Son and Svetlin Roussev chart a variety of pathways, from Waxman to Strauss.
To begin, two figures who made their indelible mark on the music written for Hollywood. Of German-Polish origins, in 1946 Franz Waxman (Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, Prince Valiant) wrote, at Jascha Heifetz’s request, a paraphrase on themes from Wagner’s Tristan et Isolde, actually an adaptation of a section of the score he composed for the film Humoresque (Warner Brothers, 1947). In summary, a manifesto in music of an impossible love – to which, at the end of the disc, an extremely rare transcription one of the better known Wesendonck-Lieder, credited to the great virtuoso Leopold Auer, forms a response.
The programme continues with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a child prodigy in Vienna during the 1910s. The famed Mariettas Lied – the best-known moment in his opera Die tote Stadt – and the sublime nocturne from his incidental music for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (the Scene in the Garden) remain as much moments of lyric intensity as truly cinematographic, deliciously intoxicating love scenes. But lovers also know how to frolic, and if already in Korngold they readily do so, the three more light-hearted pieces by Fritz Kreisler will place them in everyday, commonplace scenarios, where laughing reigns.
The keystone of the programme is unarguably the magnificent Sonata for Violin and Piano that Richard Strauss composed in 1887. He was 23 years old, and still heavily influenced by Schumann and Brahms, even Grieg. Son and Roussev make its case with radiant commitment, sensitive to the spirit stirring in the young Richard, then already in love with the soprano Pauline de Ahna, who would become his wife. This highly original album above all celebrates that moment of falling in love when, overwhelmed, the heart quivers, to the point of being transformed.