Brighton Year-Round 2024

Yoon Seok Shin Piano Recital

Yoon Seok Shin

Genre: Live Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Yoon Seok (John) Shin returned to St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton to give a welcome piano recital of Haydn, Bach transcriptions and Liszt.

Korean-British Shin is a magnificent pianist, rightly gaining plaudits and prizes. His repertoire last time centred round Beethoven’s Op 26 Pastoral Sonata and he’s always keen to explore the classical Viennese repertoire and avoid the obvious.

Shin’s technique is sovereign and shows a particular feeling for the slow expressive movements in classical and baroque, coupled with a fearsome joy and lucidity in fast ones that’s both unstoppable and makes him one of the most exciting pianists around. This time its apotheosis arrives in a romantic piece.

Shin was in for a surprise himself. The new Petroff piano delivers a tone quite unrecognizable from the French piano he played last time. His classical programme requires some finesse and church acoustics and the magnificent toe means pedalling less than previously. Shin soon turned this to advantage in his Bach transcriptions.

The Haydn Piano Sonata in C major Hb XVI/50 is one of Haydn’s best-known and latest works. Bright, celebratory and emphatic its opening Allegro contain a world in itself, almost a whole sonata with its dramatic expositions and finale-like themes almost suggesting the work ends there.

The Adagio here in Shin’s and becomes an operatic scena, but also enjoys a repose and security where some Haydn inner movements bring unquiet. The Allegro molto leaves us in no doubt this really is a finale, and exuberant, rondo-form with a tang of Hungary about it. Shin’s panache is, as ever irresistible.

The most interesting part of the recital is what Shin does with three Bach transcriptions. Firstly Bach’s one of the Adagio of Antonio Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor which Bach wholly transcribed as his BWV974. A year younger than Bach, Marcello was one of two aristocratic Venetian brothers, younger contemporaries of Vivaldi, who were drawn to music and unusually published their work.

You’ll almost certainly recognise it. Here Shin draws out something long and slightly operatic, the piano timbre rendering it other than organ, guitar and harpsichord, all of which work. Its Italianate air gives off the Venetian opera.

It’s Handelian opera most evoked in Shin’s own transcription of the second movement of Bach Keyboard Concerto No. 5 in F minor BWV1056. The long melismatic lines stripped back from orchestral accompaniment suggest more than you’d expect a different world, and the arc is beautifully realised here as Shin deploys the acoustic bloom to miraculous effect.

Finally August Stradal’s transcription of Bach Organ Sonata No. 4 BWV528, the Andante second movement is similarly transposed. It’s almost unrecognizable from its organ sonority and yet again provides a timeless meditation in a tighter form than the two previous pieces.

Finally Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No, 13 in a minor. One of the better-known of Liszt’s 19 pieces, it’s also one of the most Hungarian, in its exploratory chromaticism and folk elements, or what Liszt might have termed gypsy. The tang of dissonances and strange scales that really sound more 20^th century remind us how Bartok explored the same territory more thoroughly.

What Liszt makes of it though is extremely creative: he works in the shadows, melismas and exotic – to 9^th century ears – melodies and snatches of another world, and does so with sensitivity underscored by Shin. He can’t resist a big finish and Shin rises to this with overwhelming power and finesse.

Finally Beethoven’s Für Elise played us out on a rippling encore to fine down the experience, after a rapturous reception. The large audience, alerted to his qualities, want him back annually. One of the finest pianists to have played at St Nicholas in recent years.

Published August 1, 2024August 1, 2024 by Simon Jenner