NADSA concerts opens its 2025 series with a piano recital of four Viennese composers at the Courtenay Centre, Newton Abbot on Sunday, January 19
South Korean-born pianist Young-Choon Park began her piano studies at the tender age of four and gave her first full recital at seven.
By age nine, she had already played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Seoul Symphony Orchestra. She has performed in prestigious venues world-wide.
Young-Choon Park has chosen a brief 50 year time-span for her piano recital, but that 50 years boasted sonatas by four outstanding pianists, composers and geniuses: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.
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She will start her recital with a delightful sonata by Mozart. Composed in 1777, his Sonata No 9 in D major embraces delicacy, playfulness and vigour. It has a second movement of achingly meditative and yearning beauty. How does Mozart do it? His melodies touch us and plumb our emotional depths with such apparent ease.
Her next piece is a huge change. For his most personal musical statement of 1802—the ‘Tempest’ Sonata, Op 31 No 2—Beethoven chose the key of D minor. He didn’t use this key often, but when he did, it meant something special.
Beethoven didn’t name the piece himself, but it’s certainly tempestuous and full of contrasts: both stillness and power. Was he attempting to come to terms with his loss of hearing? He had in the early spring of that year reached utter despair. Or was it based on Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’? We’ll never know.
Young-Choon Park has chosen to open her second half with a Haydn miniature: a very simple, charming and reassuring piece. His Sonata 48 in C Major was published in 1780 as part of a set of six dedicated to talented sisters Franziska and Maria Katherina von Auenbrugger.
These works needed the flexibility of the new instrument – the forte-piano – rather than the harpsichord of his previous sonatas.
Then, in dramatic contrast, Young-Choon Park concludes her concert with a late Schubert sonata. Schubert was a monumental and influential figure of the late Classical/early Romantic era. His piano sonata No 19 in C minor, D. 958, heavily influenced by Beethoven, was composed in September 1828, two months before his tragically untimely death at the age of 31.
It was the first of his final three piano sonatas. Were they Schubert’s dedication to Beethoven, his hero? He had, after all, been a pall-bearer at Beethoven’s funeral in 1827. In I828, despite deteriorating health, Schubert created many outstanding masterpieces; this one, with moments of calm, is endlessly searching. It closes the concert with a positive declamation.
Young-Choon Park’s recital is sponsored by David Brown. Tickets must be bought in advance online www.nadsa.co.uk or by caling 01626 717730 between 9am and 5pm.