Korea makes an impact in classical circles

We're used to giving awards to Korean virtuosos, but it hasn't translated to any great level of awareness in music circles. That is set to change, given recent releases and performances, writes MICHAEL DERVAN

ON MONDAY the Hwaum Chamber Orchestra became the first Korean orchestra to play in Ireland.

We’ve become used to encountering Korean musicians in the final stages of international music competitions. In Ireland alone, the soprano Byung-Soon Lee won the Veronica Dunne Singing Competition in 1997. And no less than three Koreans made the finals of the 2009 Dublin International Piano Competition.

But, somehow, Korea doesn’t yet figure large in the minds of European music lovers. There are, of course, some famous figures. The violinist Kyung-Wha Chung created a huge impression here in the early 1970s, and she was a megastar for three decades, until her career went on hold in the new century, while she devoted time to her family and recovered from a finger injury. She resumed performing two years ago.

The composer Isang Yun (1917-1995) made it into the repertoire of the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s, and visited Dublin at the time, when he gave a public talk on his music. The Irish composer Raymond Deane studied composition with him in Berlin, and his work has more recently been taken up by the contemporary-music ensemble Concorde.

Yun made the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 1967, when he was abducted from his West Berlin apartment by South Korean agents. He was flown to Seoul to stand trial as a North Korean spy and given a jail sentence. He was eventually reprieved “on health grounds” in March 1969, but only after a West German threat to cut aid, and the delivery of a letter of protest whose signatories included Stravinsky and other leading composers.

Unsuk Chin (born 1961), who also lives in Berlin, won two prestigious awards in 2004: the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award and the Arnold Schönberg Prize. When the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra undertook a European tour last year, including a first appearance at Edinburgh International Festival, her work was part of the programme.

The Seoul orchestra signed a 10-CD deal with Deutsche Grammophon, and two CDs, of Debussy, Ravel and Mahler’s First Symphony, have already appeared under principal conductor Myung-Whun Chung, brother of Kyung-Wha.

He is by some distance the most successful conductor the Korean peninsula has produced, and his work in Europe – including the music directorship of the Bastille Opera, in Paris, and much-praised recordings of music by Messiaen – has won him a string of decorations and awards. An important bridge builder, he conducted in North Korea in 2011 and arranged a joint concert in Paris with the Unhasu Orchestra of North Korea and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France last March.

The dynamic cellist Han-Na Chang, who took the top prize in the 1994 Rostropovich Cello Competition when she was just 11 (the competition has no lower age limit), has worked in a duo with the pianist Finghin Collins in Ireland, Korea and elsewhere.

HJ Lim, a Korean pianist in her mid-20s, is making waves with her new eight-CD set of Beethoven sonatas on EMI. Her playing is remarkable for its attitude, spontaneity and sheer velocity. The set has topped both the Billboard and iTunes classical album charts and made it to No 50 in iTunes’ overall album charts. It’s available in the iTunes store for €18.99 in Ireland and just $9.99 in the US.

And what of the Hwaum Chamber Orchestra, which ended its six-city European tour at the National Concert Hall? It was founded in 1996, performs without a conductor (although it has a music director, Sang-Yeon Park) and advertises itself as its country’s leading chamber orchestra.

On Monday it played like a young, eager ensemble and was at its strongest in works that were specially written for it. The distinctions between heartfelt elegy and angular modernism in the student Shostakovich’s Prelude and Scherzo for string octet weren’t sufficiently well drawn. And there was a want of weight and intensity in Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for strings.

But the atmospheric writing of Ji-Sun Lim’s Shadow of Shadow and the travelogue colour of Brian Suits’s Tour 2012 (covering a tune from every country on the current tour) were nicely delivered. And the playing was even more pointed in the single encore, Suits’s treatment of two Korean melodies.