Top Praise for Seong-Jin Cho’s Boston recital debut

Seong-Jin Cho makes his Boston recital debut at Jordan Hall (Photo credit: Robert Torres)

At Jordan Hall, a rising generation of musicians on display
By Jeremy Eichler
The Boston Globe
December 12, 2022

On Sunday afternoon, the Celebrity Series rented out Jordan Hall once more, this time for a solo recital by pianist Seong-Jin Cho. Born in 1994 in South Korea, Cho belongs to the same generation as the Junction players but is clearly pursuing a more intentionally traditional path as a virtuoso soloist of the older Romantic model. His career in this vein was launched by his 2015 victory at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw, and he appears frequently with top-tier orchestras. This summer he delivered a sensational Brahms Second Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.

That success seems to have bolstered Cho’s local reputation, and Jordan Hall was well-attended on Sunday for his local recital debut. For the occasion, he assembled a program that included two Suites by Handel, Brahms’s “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel,” and Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes. His performance overall, true to expectations, was a tour de force in which a seemingly natural musicality was wedded to an astonishingly fluid technique.

Cho’s Handel Suites (Nos. 2 and 8) were gracefully dispatched if perhaps with an extra serving of Romantic dreaminess that softened this music’s stylistic contrast with the rest of the program. Pairing these suites with Brahms’s epic Handel Variations was a thoughtful touch, and the latter received a duly grand rendition, with each variation taking on a life of its own. Particularly impressive was his account of the closing fugue, which wedded formal clarity with visceral expressivity.

Cho gave an equally bravura performance of Schumann’s fiercely difficult Symphonic Etudes, and of the selections from Brahms’s Klavierstücke (Op. 76) that preceded them. The playing was supple and bold in equal measure. For its part, the audience was not about to let Cho leave without an encore, and he gamely obliged with two of them. Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise was a very generous offering, though its substantial length and high-Romantic register made it feel more like a continuation of the main recital program. Wilhelm Kempff’s arrangement of a Handel Minuet in G minor made a more vivid and welcome contrast — quiet, songful, glowing.

Read the full review here.