Minkyu Kim was born in South Korea in 1995. In 2017, he began his studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he is currently studying for a Doctor of Performance. Minkyu has performed piano concertos with the Scottish Ensemble and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and has had several chamber music concerts with Seoul National University Philharmonic Orchestra. He is a specialist in the sublime music of Franz Liszt

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10 No. 3

I. Presto
II. Largo e mesto

  III. Menuetto: Allegro 

  IV. Rondo: Allegro  
 

Alkan: Le festin d’Esope op 39 n.12  from Douze études dans toutes les tons mineurs en deux suites.

Liszt:

  En rêve — Nocturne, S207

  Trübe Wolken – Nuages gris, S199

  Bagatelle sans tonalité, S216a

Grosses Konzertsolo, S176.

An extraordinary recital by Minkyu Kim in Florence
An eclectic programme played with the simplicity and humility of a great musician with a voracious appetite for many neglected masterpieces.With a transcendental technical commmand he thrilled the audience in the library of the celebrated aesthete Harold Acton with Beethoven’s early Sonata op 10 n. 3 where his genius was already beginning to manifest itself with its profound and intense slow movement.Alkan’s pianistic genius was revealed with astonishing brilliance as his animals were let out of their cage and allowed to sprawl all over this 1876 Bechstein.

But it was the Genius of Liszt that Minkyu was to demonstrate to us with the ‘Grosses Konzertsolo’,the much neglected monumental forerunner of the B minor Sonata .He played it with towering committed artistry that will surely astonish the Professors of the Royal Scottish Academy where he is about to complete his doctorate before embarking on an obligatory military career in the Korean army!

“Il penseroso” a poem and sculpture by Michelangelo that sits in the Medici Chapel that had inspired Liszt to write a piece for his ‘Years of Travel’ when he visited the city in 1838 .Minkyu had learnt it especially as a homage to Liszt and to Florence on this occasion …..an encore from an eclectic thinking musician and superb virtuoso pianist.It was fascinating to hear him explain the ‘preludes’ he had improvised between pieces as was the practice in the 18th Century to prepare the public for the next piece.And to know that the ‘prelude’ to the Grosses Konzertsolo was from the orchestral introduction of it that Liszt had insisted be played before his orchestral version (left unfinished by Liszt but completed and recorded by Leslie Howard )

Minkyu Kim a pianistic and musical genius at St Mary’s

Minkyu Kim – mastery exults to the glory of Liszt

Minkyu Kim at St Mary’s Viva Franz Liszt – the poet of the piano!

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10, No. 3, was dedicated to the Countess Anne Margarete von Browne, and written in 1798. This makes it contemporary with his three string trios op 9 , his three Op. 12 violin sonatas, and the violin and orchestra romance that became his op 50 when later published. The year also saw the premiere of a revised version of his second piano concerto whose original form had been written and heard in 1795.The three Op. 10 sonatas are usually described as angular or experimental, as Beethoven began moving further and further away from his earlier models. This third sonata of the set is the longest and is the only one of the Op. 10 sonatas that has four movements and Beethoven’s pupil the teacher of Franz Liszt described it as ‘grand and significant’

Le festin d’Ésope (Aesop’s Feast), op .39 No. 12, is the final étude in the set Douze études dans tours le tons miners (Twelve studies in all minor keys), Op. 39, published in 1857 (although it may have been written during the previous decade). It is a work of twenty-five variations based on an original theme and is in E minor. The technical skills required in the variations are a summation of the preceding études.

The work requires exceptional virtuosic skills, with extremely fast overlapping octaves, fast scales with left accompaniments, enormous leaps, rapid octave chords, tremolos, double octaves and trills. A typical performance of this piece lasts 10 minutes.

At a later stage in his life Liszt experimented with “forbidden” things such as parallel 5ths in the “Csárdás macabre”and atonality in the Bagatelle sans tonality (“Bagatelle without Tonality”). Pieces like the “2nd Mephisto-Waltz” are unconventional because of their numerous repetitions of short motives. Also showing experimental characteristics are the Via crucis of 1878, as well as Unstern!, Nuages Gris and the two works entitled La lugubre gondola of the 1880s.

En rève (‘Dreaming’) was composed in 1885 and unlike in many of the works from the last years of Liszt’s life, nothing disillusioned or bleak, but rather a note of acceptance and reconciliation.

Nuages gris or Trübe Wolken,was composed on August 24, 1881. It is one of Liszt’s most haunting and at the same time one of his most experimental works, representing , “a high point in the experimental idiom with respect to expressive compositional procedure.” Yet it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the significance of Liszt’s late experimental works began to be appreciated. “Arguably, Liszt was the first composer to establish the augmented triad as a truly independent sonority, to consider its implications for modern dissonance treatment, and to ponder its meaning for the future course of tonality. Liszt’s accomplishments were summarised in Busoni’s phrase, as the ‘master of freedom’.Debussy probably had Nuages gris in mind when he composed his own Nuages .On a more mundane note it was used in the shocking scene at the morgue in Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut.

Bagatelle sans tonalité was written by in 1885. The manuscript bears the title “Fourth Mephisto Waltz”and may have been intended to replace the piece now known as the Fourth Mephisto Waltz when it appeared Liszt would not be able to finish it; the phrase Bagatelle ohne Tonart actually appears as a subtitle on the front page of the manuscript.

While it is not especially dissonant, it is extremely chromatic becoming what Liszt’s contemporary Fétis called “omnitonic”in that it lacks any definite feeling for a tonal center.Like the Fourth Mephisto Waltz, however, it was not published until 1955.

Années de pèlerinage S.160-161-162-163is a set of three suites for solo piano by . Much of it derives from his earlier work, Album d’un voyageur, his first major published piano cycle, which was composed between 1835 and 1838 and published in 1842.Années de pèlerinage is widely considered as the masterwork and summation of Liszt’s musical style. The third volume is notable as an example of his later style Composed well after the first two volumes, it displays less virtuosity and more harmonic experimentation.

The title Années de pèlerinage refers to Goethe’s famous novel of self-realization, whose original title Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre meant Years of Wandering or Years of Pilgrimage, the latter being used for its first French translation.Liszt clearly places these compositions in line with the Romantic literature of his time, prefacing most pieces with a literary passage from writers such as Schiller, Byron or Senancour, and, in an introduction to the entire work, writing:

“Having recently travelled to many new countries, through different settings and places consecrated by history and poetry; having felt that the phenomena of nature and their attendant sights did not pass before my eyes as pointless images but stirred deep emotions in my soul, and that between us a vague but immediate relationship had established itself, an undefined but real rapport, an inexplicable but undeniable communication, I have tried to portray in music a few of my strongest sensations and most lively impressions.^”

Deuxième année: Italie” (“Second Year: Italy”), S.161, was composed between 1837 and 1849 and published in 1858 by Schott. Nos. 4 to 6 are revisions of Tre sonetti del Petrarca which was composed around 1839–1846 and published in 1846.All three are based on Sonnets, or Canzone, by the Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). They are meditations on love, specifically the poet’s passionate love for Laura de Noves. In the first, Benedetto sia ‘L giorno -Blessed be the day…., Canzone LXI, sometimes erroneously noted as Sonnet 104), he prays for divine blessing on the joys and sufferings of love. The second, Pace non trovo – I find no peace….. Canzone CXXXIV; sometimes erroneously noted as Sonnet 47is more agitated. In it, the poet ponders the confused state love has put him in. Enthralled to his lady, he feels imprisoned yet free, he burns with love, yet feels he is made of ice: in modern psychological parlance, a true state of ‘limerence’. The third, lividi in terra angelici costumi – I Beheld on Earth Angelic Grace…., Canzone CLVI; sometimes incorrectly listed as Sonnet 123, is an ardent love poem in which the poet describes the perfect beauty and purity of his love and its effect on all of Heaven and Nature.

In 1851 Breitkopf & Härtel published the solo piano work Grosses Konzertsolo S.176. Though not as popular as the later Sonata in B minor the work achieves significance by the fact that it anticipates the Sonata as a large-scale nonprogrammatic work. It shows structural similarities to the Sonata and obvious thematic relationship to both the Sonata and the Faust Symphony.

One unpublished earlier version of the work exists, titled in French in the manuscript Grand Solo de concert (S.175a). This version differs structurally from the published Grosses Concert-Solo, thus revealing the existence of interesting material for a study on the genesis of Liszt’s gradual innovations in constructing a large-scale musical organism, which were to come to full fruition in the Sonata.

In 1866 a two-piano version was published under the title Concerto pathétique (S.258/2) which, though not differing structurally from the Grosses Concert-Solo, introduces a more effective layout of the musical thoughts, mainly due to an innovative concerto-like treatments of the two piano version.The fact that the solo Grosses Concert-Solo has been overshadowed by the later two-piano version has obscured the importance of the former as one of Liszt’s largest and most ambitious original works for the instrument. The Grosses Concert-Solo anticipates several of the most salient features of Liszt’s undisputed masterwork, the Sonata in B minor , namely the nonprogrammatic “four-movements-in-one” form.The piece was written between 1849 and 1850, and dedicated to Adolf Henselt who professed himself unable to play it, even though Liszt had intended it as a competition piece for the Paris Conservatoire.

Leslie Howard the noted Liszt expert having recorded all the works of Liszt on over 100 CD’s .He is an Artistic Director of the Keyboard Trust and is president of the Liszt Society in London and is seen here talking about and playing the Grosses Konzertsolo :

Exploring Liszt with Leslie Howard