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Korea Herald
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Park Sueye triumphs at International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition
The 25-year-old becomes second Korean violinist to win, after Yang In-mo's 2022 victory Three years after violinist Yang In-mo became the first Korean to win the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition, fellow Korean virtuoso Park Sueye claimed the top prize at the competition's 13th edition, held in Helsinki on May 29. Founded in 1965 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius' birth, the competition is held every five years and is regarded as one of the most demanding and respected violin competitions in the world. Past winners include legendary figures such as Viktoria Mullova, Leonidas Kavakos and Sergey Khachatryan. Park is the second Korean to win the competition, following Yang In-mo's historic win in 2022. 'I'm incredibly happy to have won the Sibelius Competition,' the 25-year-old said after the announcement. 'It was a meaningful journey, and I'm so grateful that I was able to communicate my music through to the very end. It still feels surreal, but I'm grateful for everyone who rooted for me,' she said. While this is her first major win at an international competition, the young violinist has already carved out a distinct identity in the classical music world, with five critically acclaimed albums to her name. She released her debut recording, 'Paganini: 24 Caprices,' in November 2017 at the age of 16, becoming the youngest artist to record the complete set. In an interview with The Korea Herald in May 2023, Park reflected on her evolving identity as both a performer and educator. She described each of her albums not merely as recordings, but as personal milestones -- markers of growth at different stages in her life and career as well as a testament to her transformative musical journey. 'I'm not sure if I would try to record the complete Paganini again when I turn 35. But to be honest, when I listen to my first album, it's already very different,' she said. Her sixth album, a solo violin recording titled 'Exil!,' is set to be released in July by BIS Records. The album features Bartok's Sonata for Solo Violin, selections from Ysaye's Six Sonatas, and other technically demanding pieces. Two years ago, Park began to take her artistic practice beyond the stage. 'I guess I'm a polymath. I feel slightly happier when performing solo, but I have also changed through meeting many people. I'd also like to play in an ensemble and an orchestra, as well as teach,' Park told The Korea Herald. 'I learn a lot from teaching and performing in an orchestra once in a while. All of these experiences enhance my understanding of music.' A total of 40 violinists participated in the 13th International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition. Following the first and second rounds held from May 19 to May 25, six finalists, including Park, were selected. For the final round, Park performed Oliver Knussen's Violin Concerto Op. 30 with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. Her prize includes 30,000 euros ($34,000) in cash, upcoming engagements with Finland's top orchestras, mentorship under violinist Pekka Kuusisto and conductor-violinist John Storgards, and a one-year loan of the 1777 Guadagnini violin 'ex Sasson,' facilitated by Beare's International Violin Society. Second prize was awarded to Minami Yoshida from Japan and third prize to Claire Wells from the United States. This year's jury consisted of seven violinists, including Korea's own Lee Sung-ju and Cho Jin-joo, who served as Kumho Art Hall's artist-in-residence in 2015.
The Guardian
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: Khovanshchina; Carmen review – the parallels with modern Russia are unmissable
Dawn over the Moskva River. The bells of the Kremlin, deep and massive, toll. Red Square, deserted in the early morning, is pocked with the violence of a mob uprising the night before. Russia is in turmoil. So begins Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81), unfinished at his death from alcoholic delirium at the age of 42, and one of the unsolved riddles of the operatic repertoire. This grand, sprawling work opened the 2025 Salzburg Easter festival, well suited to this year's theme of 'wounds and wonders', in a compelling new production conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and performed by an international cast and musicians from Salonen's homeland, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. With sleuth-like determination over eight years and counting, he and a creative team led by the British fraternal partnership of director Simon McBurney and composer Gerard McBurney – fondly referred to in Salzburg as the McBrothers – presented a world-premiere staging of a new version of the opera. Originally intended for the Bolshoi theatre, Moscow in 2020, first Covid and then the invasion of Ukraine put paid to any such plan. Khovanshchina is steeped in the Russian psyche. Mussorgsky, grappling with his country's schismatic social and religious history, saw the past in the present. Using factual sources, he wrote his own idiosyncratic libretto, taking the so-called Khovansky Affair of the late 17th century as his starting point: Old Believers rise up against the westernising reforms of a regime that would lead to the rule of Peter the Great. The parallels with modern Russia are unmissable but not exact. This opera has no heroes. The sight, on the Salzburg stage, of a clean-shaven politician in grey suit, standing at a lectern in front of a replica of the Bolshoi curtain issuing diktats, needs no comment. The feudal lord Khovansky (Vitalij Kowaljow), facing death and festering in a self-indulgence of lust and drugs, has conspicuous oligarchic tendencies. Make your own connections. Every character is an embodiment of a ruthless faction seeking dominion, expressed through the raw melodies that are Mussorgsky's hallmarks, the drama always driven by the music, liturgical chant dipping in and out of folk song and sung-speech patterns. Epic and populous choruses (superbly sung by the Slovak Philharmonic Choir and others), also a key component of the composer's better-known masterpiece, Boris Godunov, hold up a mirror to the suffering of a nation. Against this historical tapestry, one fictional role offers a change of pace: that of Marfa, Old Believer and clairvoyant, Mother Russia figure, lover of seemingly every man on the stage, now violent, now devout. She is played with exceptional vocal and dramatic brilliance by the young mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina, born in Moscow, living in Switzerland, in what is surely a career-making performance. Resonant and strong at the top of her range, rich and potent in the contralto low notes, she is pivotal, offering humanity and empathy. At the moment of apocalypse, when the Old Believers determine on mass suicide, she raises her arms as a shower of earth falls on her, one of many moments of beauty in a production unafraid of harsh, modern realities. All the physical theatre strengths of Simon McBurney, best known for work with his company Complicité and a rare but probing visitor to opera (his stagings of Wozzeck for Aix-en-Provence and The Magic Flute for English National Opera, currently on at New York's Metropolitan Opera, have been triumphs), are brought into play, to bracing effect. In Rebecca Ringst's striking designs, which also use live video, the stage shifts from open space to steep rake to triangular compression, performers and chorus moving with fearless energy. In a large cast, Thomas Atkins, Ain Anger, Daniel Okulitch, Natalia Tanasii and Matthew White stood out. The reconstruction by Gerard McBurney, as fiercely imaginative as it is resolutely faithful – every note written, in some form or other, by Mussorgsky – uses material discovered in a Russian museum in the 1960s, woven convincingly together with the rest. The ending by Stravinsky (made, when he was in the midst of The Rite of Spring, at the request of the impresario Diaghilev) and the 1959 orchestration by Shostakovich for a film, the basis of most modern performances, are used here. McBurney's new musical bridge provides a missing link to the opera's skein of broken threads. A reflection of the importance of this staging of Khovanshchina was the presence in Salzburg of every opera intendant of note, among them those from Munich, Aix, the Royal Opera and the New York Met, where the production will travel, probably in 2030. By then its relevance may be even more acute. Bizet's Carmen, though minimally problematic in comparison, also exists in different versions. Damiano Michieletto's staging for the Royal Opera, revived by Dan Dooner, lacks focus and often looks chaotic, especially in crowd scenes. With Bizet's fertile score and the alluring 28-year-old Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina reprising her Carmen (apparently she will have sung it 100 times by the end of this season), there is much to enjoy. Despite an apology for illness, she still sang stunningly, even while lying on her back, and shimmied perfectly around her drooling menfolk. As Don José, the British tenor Freddie De Tommaso gradually relaxed to display his famed shining top notes and, as the role demands, an awkward, stiff pathos. This is not a vintage Carmen on stage, but the conducting of Mark Elder, pliant, springy and detailed, and the dazzling playing by the orchestra, reminded us anew of Bizet's short-lived but enduring genius. Star ratings (out of five)Khovanshchina ★★★★★ Carmen ★★★ Khovanshchina is at the Salzburg Easter festival, Austria, until 21 April Carmen is at the Royal Opera, London, until 3 July
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Unfinished Opera Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant
Instead of finishing his masterpiece 'Khovanshchina,' Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk. That's fiction: a scene from 'Moscow-Petushki,' a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of 'Khovanshchina' that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history. 'Yerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life — they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,' McBurney said in an interview. In real life, Mussorgsky 'embarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,' McBurney added. 'And he couldn't finish it.' McBurney has created a new, completed 'Khovanshchina,' and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a 'musical folk drama'), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film. McBurney called his contribution to the palimpsest of 'Khovanshchina' a bridge, built from melodic sketches, between Mussorgsky's music and the Stravinsky finale. Last year, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, performed a concert version of McBurney's completion. On Saturday, it will be staged in Salzburg, with the same conductor and orchestra, and directed by McBurney's brother, Simon. A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, it will travel to New York in the future. A recent rehearsal of 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg showed the work coming together with a striking, contemporary vision. The piece concerns political intrigue in 1682, but this performance features a blunt, vernacular new translation of the libretto; a staging of skin-crawling immediacy; and a fierce, unsentimental reading of the score. Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, this production embraces the work's unfinished state. McBurney's bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece. Hearing it, you can't forget how much is still missing from 'Khovanshchina.' 'We both agreed that it should be very simple, and instead of trying to create continuity between these bits and pieces, we should just accept that there isn't any,' Salonen said in an interview. 'These are fragments, and it just kind of is what it is.' McBurney has been fascinated with Mussorgsky since he was 14, when his father, the archaeologist Charles McBurney, traveled to Moscow and Leningrad to discuss his research findings with scholars. Charles mentioned to his K.G.B. minder that his son was fascinated by classical music; the minder gave him an enormous case of recordings from the state-owned label Melodiya to bring back to England. Those introduced Gerard to Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and 'Boris Godunov.' He soon became captivated by 'Khovanshchina' as well. 'I was always interested in its fragmentary and unfinished nature,' he said. In 1984, Gerard McBurney moved to Moscow, where he learned Russian and studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory. That experience has been invaluable for his work on 'Khovanshchina.' In addition to the musical reconstruction, McBurney has been making a contemporary English version of the libretto, with the translator Hannah Whitley, that preserves the original's vernacular. In one scene, the authoritarian Prince Ivan Khovansky tells the fanatical leader of the Old Believers, Dositheus, 'Together we will make Russia great again.' At another point, the title of the opera — often rendered as 'The Khovansky Affair' — is translated as something unprintable. Such choices capture the idiosyncratic style of the Russian libretto, which Mussorgsky developed, collagelike, from an obsessive study of the historical record and careful attention to the way people spoke on the street. 'He built himself an armature, and then he stuck these random bits on it,' McBurney said. 'And then, as the piece possessed him over the years, he started to weave in his own dreamlike riffs on the material.' Simon McBurney, the co-founder and artistic director of the theater company Complicité and an actor, is also interested in the work's contemporary resonances. His staging places it firmly within present-day authoritarianism. But, he said in an interview, the story of 'Khovanshchina' hardly needs updating. In the drama, there are no heroes, only ambivalent villains. Power asserts itself mercilessly, and the action is shot through with apocalyptic premonitions, which reminds him of our time. 'The young people I know sense the presence of the shadow, and therefore the impending catastrophe,' McBurney said. 'I'm not trying to bring it into the staging of the opera. It is there already.' Still, experience has taught him that relevance and realism are not the same thing. McBurney knows that the naturalistic acting style used in film can easily fall flat in opera, which has a slower pace in which the magic lies in a kind of zooming in on time. For 'Khovanshchina,' he worked with the singers to 'heighten' their acting, he said, making the movements onstage both slower and more intense. 'My job as a director is to get them — sometimes to teach them — how to hold the gesture in the body,' he said. 'Root it in the reality, but also find the dynamic form with the body which can work with the dynamic form of the music.' In Salonen's reading of that music, Mussorgsky's score is lean, metallic and very fast. Older recordings of 'Khovanshchina' tend to be sumptuous and Romantic, luxuriating in the composer's folk-inspired melodies. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra renders the same melodies as ephemeral as the bits of text from which Mussorgsky assembled his libretto. Mussorgsky's unusual spinning modulations convey the feeling of events spiraling out of control. 'I thought from the start that it shouldn't linger, because history is moving really fast at this point,' Salonen said. 'There are some moments of calm — little oasis moments — but it should never be static.' Still, the past has had a way of inserting itself into this production. The Russian mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina sings the part of Marfa, who is caught between love and the strict dogmas of the Old Believers. Some of Karyazina's ancestors on her father's side were members of that faith. They never talked about it, until her grandfather told her about her roots while they were listening to a scene from 'Khovanshchina' on the radio. A tragedy of Mussorgsky's drama is how political upheaval severs connections among people, their land and their history. 'People want to feel that they're not just a bit of fluff and when they die, there will be nothing left of them,' Gerard McBurney said. 'Somehow, if they could feel that their roots drew from the soil they loved when they were first growing up — that's a constant theme in the text of this opera. It's the longing for an impossible dream.'
