“Cho’s playing combines poetic phrasing with a structured intelligence”, “Virtuoso brilliance meets narrative poetry”: There is no doubt that Seong-Jin Cho is one of those exceptional talents who not only have perfect mastery of their instrument, but also possess the gift of telling compelling musical stories.
A prime example of this is the Korean superstar’s Heinersdorff programme: not only does it span a spectrum from Mozart, the magician of sound, to Prokofiev, the god of the piano, right through to Jörg Widmann and his allusive compositional art. The works themselves also tell stories: of the tragic love of Romeo and Juliet; of war and peace in Prokofiev’s ‘War Sonata’, Op. 84; of Felix Mendelssohn, for whom the elderly Goethe placed a previously unknown fragment by Mozart on the piano for him to play. And of a light-footed tribute from Jörg Widmann, spanning the centuries, to Mozart and his *Sonata facile*.
Jörg Widmann: Sonatina facile; Sergei Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet. Ten Pieces for Piano, Op. 75; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Fantasy in C minor, K. 396 (385f); Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata No. 8 in B flat major, Op. 84 (Source: KTK Heinersdorff)
