MIROIRS
Hyejin Kim, Piano
Navona Records 6383 / TT: 78’11”
It is always interesting to ponder on the career of a young pianist whom one has heard in the past. It may have been in a concert or piano competition, and one wondered whatever happened to that artist over the years. I first encountered the young South Korean pianist Hyejin Kim at the 2008 Hong Kong International Piano Competition where she won the fourth prize, and had described her as “one possessed with the greatest of confidence” and a “genuinely individual and creative personality”. Her latest recital disc confirms the high opinions (and expectations) I had of her at the time, and reassures me that true artistry does not fade but gets better with time.
Her recital opens with the five pieces of Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs (Mirrors), impressionist masterpiece contemporaneous with Debussy’s Images, and even preceding the books of Preludes. Noctuelles (Night Moths) and Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds) are possessed with an indelible sense of colour and shade, aided by precise articulation and excellent control of pedalling. This continues into Une barque sur l’ocean (A Boat on the Ocean), where lapping waves gradually build up to tremendous swells, resembling the famous Hokusai print. Had Ravel used that to illustrate the cover page of Miroirs, rather than Debussy in La Mer, no one would have blinked.
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| Not a bad cover design for Ravel's Miroirs? |
The well-known Alborada del gracioso (Morning Song of the Jester) was alive with the rhythmic clatter of castanets and Flamenco footsteps on the dance floor, culminating with a series of glissandi sweeping the keyboard. In a vivid portrait of the mystical Orient, La vallee des cloches (The Valley of Bells) presents no less than six sets of pealing bells, of differing pitches and timbres in varying distances, in simple juxtaposition and counterpoint. Kim plays these most idiomatically, rounding up a set that can easily compete with the best on disc.
A sense of desolation and despair may be discerned in two pieces from Enrique Granados’ Goyescas, a suite inspired by the paintings of courtly love by Francisco Goya. El Amor y la muerte (Love and Death) is an exquisite tone poem that also quotes from the more familiar La Maja y el ruisenor (Maiden and the Nightingale), the beauty of tone displayed by Kim belying something more sinister and fatal. Unusually inserted between the two pieces is Ravel’s La Valse, a portrait of an empire’s end manifested by fatalistic swirling by dancers oblivious of the oblivion to come. Kim’s confident performance at once evinces glitter and glamor, but also mounting danger and desperation. On the technical front, she is unimpeachable.
Closing with the solo truncated edition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Kim gives a suitably extroverted account, full of verve and swagger. With added notes, frills and doublings thrown in for good measure, this is the thrilling icing on an already impressive recital disc.
To sample / download / purchase this album, please go to the Navona Records catalogue page:
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