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Unsuk Chin
Taking the concerto form and reimagining it in her own terms … Unsuk Chin. Photograph: Eric Richmond
Taking the concerto form and reimagining it in her own terms … Unsuk Chin. Photograph: Eric Richmond

Unsuk Chin: Piano Concerto; Cello Concerto; Šu review – reimagining the concerto form

This article is more than 9 years old
Kim/Gerhardt/Wu Wei/Seoul PO/Chung
(Deutsche Grammophon)

It was a concerto, her 2001 work for violin, that won Unsuk Chin the high-profile Grawemeyer award for music three years later. The three works here – the Piano Concerto composed in 1997, the other two in 2009, though the Cello Concerto was revised last year – show how writing concertos has been a consistent thread through Chin's orchestral output; as well as these works, she has also produced a double concerto for piano and percussion, and one for clarinet, which received its world premiere this month.

For all its craftmanship and vividly imagined textures, the Violin Concerto was relatively conventional, both in its form and in the way it treated the relationship between the soloist and the orchestra, but in these pieces there's much more sense of Chin taking the concerto form and reimagining it in her own terms. The Cello Concerto, first performed at the 2009 Proms, is the biggest and most ambitious of the three, and arguably the most important concerto for that instrument to appear since Lutosławski's in 1970. The solo writing pushes the cellist – the superb Alban Gerhardt – to the limits of the possible, while constantly reassessing the way it and the orchestra respond to each other. Its centre of gravity is the searching third movement, after which the finale brings, not resolution exactly, but an agreement to differ between the cello and the orchestra, as the solo line steadily rises until it seems finally to evaporate altogether.

The Cello Concerto is a work in which the influence of Chin's teacher, György Ligeti, is hardly felt at all, other than perhaps in the sheer fastidiousness and precision of the sounds that she imagines. In the Piano Concerto, though, the solo writing often seems close to that of Ligeti's Piano Studies with extra layers of orchestral decoration added, though as the soloist Sunwook Kim shows, the total effect is undeniably brilliant and effective. In Šu, a single-movement concerto for sheng, the Chinese instrument that's like a giant mouth organ played vertically, the sounds and their syntax are very much Chin's own; she wrote it specifically for the Berlin-based sheng-player Wu Wei, and it's his extraordinary virtuosity that allows her to create such original textures, with the sheng adding a reedy edge to the slowly shifting chords, or a shimmering haze to the more swiftly moving passages. The effects are beautifully judged and, as in all the works here, meticulously realised by the Seoul Philharmonic under Myung-Whun Chung.

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