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ROMANTIC TALES • Quentin Kim (pn) • BLUE GRIFFIN 161 (75:00)
LISZT Impromptu in F♯. WEBER Piano Sonata No. 2. Kim Sensucht. Prelude and Fugue in c♯. BRAHMS Piano Pieces, op. 76. SAINT-SAËNS Étude en forme de valse. BACH Arioso
Romantic Tales
Audio CD
Blue Griffin
This release has about it the feel of a debut album, for if Quentin Kim has appeared on record before, evidence of it is not forthcoming, and this is certainly my first encounter with him. Obviously a gifted young artist, the Korean-born Kim has taken first prize at a number of international competitions, and has been well received in concert and recital venues throughout the U.S. and abroad. His teachers include Claude Frank and Jerome Lowenthal, among others. Also active as a composer, Kim has written two piano sonatas, a piano trio, a string quartet, and an operatic scene, as well as many songs and shorter works for piano, all of which are published by Edition Pacelli.
Three dress suits are available to the debutant for the coming-out party: (1) risking everything with a recording of the Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff concertos or a disc of the most popular Beethoven sonatas, a risk that has sometimes ended a career before it started; (2) risking little or nothing with a recording of an obscure, esoteric, or otherwise impenetrable work for which you will be admired as was the naked emperor of fabled fame; or (3) appearing in a recital of mixed bonbons consisting of virtuosic showpieces and lightweight crowd-pleasers, among which, to lend some gravitas, you embed a more serious piece or two. Kim has chosen suit number three for his debutant’s ball. The advantage of the mixed menu recital for the audience is that one hears how adept the artist is at shifting gears and adapting his or her manner of playing to a variety of composers and musical styles. The disadvantage is that it is harder to judge insight in matters of developmental skills and structural cohesion—i.e., the artist’s ability to pull together the strands of a lengthy work and present an organized picture that reveals something to us about the whole rather than just an accumulation of its individual parts.
Because of the nature of the program Kim has chosen to present, it is not possible to say how he might fare in a work such as, say, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. But in modifying his technical approach in matters such as pedaling, rubato, weighting of chords, and voicing, as well as in adapting his interpretive style, Kim proves quite masterful. The Brahms op. 76, in particular, makes a compelling case for Kim’s special sensitivity to and grasp of where this music is coming from. Carl Maria von Weber’s piano sonatas have never quite entered the mainstream as have those of his close contemporary, Schubert, but they have much to recommend them. Superbly written for the instrument and with virtuosic fireworks aplenty, the A♭-Major Sonata balances its hire-wire acrobatics against its operatic scena-like passages with exquisite compositional skill, and Kim’s performance of it is a welcome addition to an otherwise limited discography. The award for razzle-dazzle, however, not surprisingly, goes to Saint-Saëns’s irresistible piece of pianistic puff pastry, the sixth of his op. 52 Etudes in waltz form, the kind of glitzy potboiler that this composer concocted so artfully.
Recorded in Blue Griffin’s Ballroom Studio in Lansing, Michigan, in September 2007, this is an impressive introduction to a gifted young pianist who merits further hearing and watching. Jerry Dubins
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