Latest news with #UnsukChin
New York Times
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Hear the Sound of a New Generation of South Korean Musicians
'Compare Korea to China or Russia,' the composer Unsuk Chin said in a recent interview. 'If you think how small the country is, it's amazing how many talented musicians are coming out.' South Korean artists are prominent on classical music's most prestigious stages. The young pianists Seong-Jin Cho and Yunchan Lim sell out Carnegie Hall. The conductor Myung-whun Chung was recently named the next music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Chin's new opera, 'The Dark Side of the Moon,' premiered in Hamburg in May. Now, to explore South Korea's creative output, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is presenting the Seoul Festival from Tuesday through June 10. It is the latest in a series of themed Philharmonic events, including dives into Iceland and Mexico. Around 2018, the orchestra and its artistic leader at the time, Chad Smith, asked Chin to help plan a South Korean iteration, but the plans were derailed by the pandemic. About half of the original programming has made it intact onto this year's concerts. 'I really wanted to present the youngest generation of composers, conductors and musicians,' said Chin, 63. That generation has emerged from what she called 'a very long cultural tradition.' The country's embrace of Western musical culture began around the turn of the 20th century, and a Western-style compositional tradition took hold with figures like Isang Yun (1917-95), who wrote avant-garde music for Western instruments — but with a style that attempted to translate old-school Korean techniques. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: A New Opera Gives Music to the Unsaid and Unsayable
Unsuk Chin's new opera conveys, with uncanny precision, the restless energies inside a person's head. Called 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' ('The Dark Side of the Moon'), the work premiered on Sunday at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany. It's a reinterpretation of the Faust myth, drawing loose inspiration from a famous series of letters between the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. This is Chin's second opera, following 'Alice in Wonderland,' which was first performed at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007. It was as kinetic as her new one, though sillier, more eclectic and ultimately more haunting. 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' centers on a character called Dr. Kieron, sung by the baritone Thomas Lehman. He is an irascible yet brilliant scientist whose harsh perfectionism masks a fragmenting mental state. Searching for human connection and trying to slow the ferocious pace of his thoughts, he falls prey to a cynical, Nietzsche-quoting faith healer, Master Astaroth, performed by the baritone Bo Skovhus. At the start of the opera, Dr. Kieron's sung text shows a confident man with bristly charisma. He mocks his assistant, his students and his colleagues with laser wit; In response, they grudgingly praise his intellect. Later, in a seedy bar, he entertains the other patrons with ludicrous tall tales that they believe despite themselves. Dr. Kieron's behavior recalls Pauli, who dismissed bad science by saying it was 'not even wrong,' but also Chin's teacher, the composer Gyorgy Ligeti. 'Ligeti was the harshest critic you could ever imagine,' she has said, 'not only toward his students, but to his colleagues and himself.' Chin's music takes us into Dr. Kieron's psyche, and it's an exhausting place. Melodic fragments flare up and burst; orchestral registers and timbres shift constantly. The score shows a mind that can't stay still. No wonder Dr. Kieron searches for solace with Master Astaroth, whose therapy-speak pronouncements seem profound when accompanied by blessedly static, ethereal music. 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' is a work of restless sonic invention. Dr. Kieron suffers because his mind can't linger, and neither can Chin's musical imagination. Between the two structural poles of crackling energy and eerie stillness, Chin finds more than enough fascinating sounds for the opera's three-and-a-half-hour running time (including intermission). In the bar scene, she writes exquisitely fragmented dance music, filtered as if through a hazy cloud of morning-after memories. A dream-world character called the Bright Girl (the soprano Narea Son) sings delicate pricks of notes. The perception makes them into melody, as it makes shapes out of groups of stars. Gently pulsing string harmonics make us mourn the loss of the Creature of Light (the tenor Andrew Dickinson), another dream figure whom Dr. Kieron treats like an old friend. The opera's premiere was staged by the theater collective Dead Centre, with a set that was austere but memorable, emphasizing the work's sense of cosmic isolation and the overlap between the pregnant symbols of physics and Jungian psychology. The Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, under Kent Nagano, who also led Chin's 'Alice in Wonderland,' played her painstakingly orchestrated music with vigor and transparency. Singing the score was a monumental task, and while the cast contributed beautifully, they occasionally seemed overwhelmed. And at times, their voices were swallowed by the stage. Close-up video feeds showed the kind of operatic overacting that often results from insecurity. Lehman, present almost constantly, tackled his vast role gamely, but suffered the occasional memory lapse. That was understandable, given the sheer amount of text in the opera. The first hour or so of the work crackled with energy. As it progressed, though, the piece slowly collapsed under the weight of its leaden libretto. Those problems began in the fifth scene, a long dialogue between Dr. Kieron and Master Astaroth in which the rational scientist gradually gives in to the charlatan's charms. What should have felt like a seduction got bogged down in clunky exposition. 'I am so often considered, unfairly, a bad philosopher, a charlatan even,' Master Astaroth sings. 'So unfair! Of course I do not wish to be anything inferior.' Chin served as her own librettist, in collaboration with the writer and dramaturg Kerstin Schüssler-Bach. The German-language text has memorable moments, with wry jokes and light parody of Central European social mores. But it is largely overwrought, and there is also simply too much of it. By the end of the piece, the text, including an 'Oppenheimer'-style subplot about an 'ultimate bomb,' feels crammed into the shrinking musical space. (When a new opera contains lots of quick, half-spoken, half-sung prose, it's usually a sign that the deadline was approaching.) There are also numerous small text-setting mistakes, which became distracting as they accumulated on Sunday. Chin's vocal lines often emphasized the wrong syllable in the word. And the bloated writing felt especially jarring in the context of music that never lost its agility, subtlety and capacity to surprise. 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' began remarkably attuned to the ferocious energy of the imperceptible, illustrating the physical and physic forces that lurk beneath the surface of the world. The music offered a vivid window into the unsaid and the unsayable. But by the end, the words had said so much they overwhelmed that music. 'When the full moon is out like tonight, I can't observe any stars anyway,' Dr. Kieron sings early in the opera. 'The full moon outshines all the stars in the night sky.'
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Korea Herald
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
[Exclusive] Composer Chin Unsuk to continue as Tongyeong International Music Festival artistic director
Amid festival's success, Chin's tenure to be extended beyond her initial five-year term TONGYEONG, South Gyeongsang Province -- Renowned composer Unsuk Chin's leadership at the Tongyeong International Music Festival is set to continue, as she and the foundation are close to signing an extension beyond her initial five-year term as the festival's artistic director, according to people familiar with the matter. Now in her fourth year at the helm, Chin presides over this year's festival, which opened Friday in the southern coastal city of Tongyeong under the theme 'Journey Inwards.' The festival opened Friday with a captivating performance by pianist Lim Yunchan, the festival's artist-in-residence, and the festival orchestra led by French conductor Fabien Gabel. The planned extension comes as the festival is enjoying broader popularity and setting its sights beyond Korea. 'The mid- to long-term goal is to expand our audience to other parts of Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan,' Kim So-hyun, the foundation's Director of Artistic Administration, said during a press conference on Friday. The Tongyeong International Music Festival launched in 2002 as a tribute to the internationally acclaimed composer Yun I-sang (1917–1995), who, born in the city, had an active career in Germany. The festival's early journey was challenged by limited funding, a lack of infrastructure and its remote location -- more than a four-hour drive from Seoul. Opened in 2014, the Tongyeong Concert Hall and its renowned acoustics played a key role in propelling the festival's growth. Given that preparations for the festival must begin years in advance, the foundation was expected to start searching for a new artistic director. However, with Chin expressing her willingness to continue, the contract extension is expected to be finalized soon, according to sources. In 2022, then-CEO Lee Yong-min noted that Chin had signed an 'unusually long five-year contract.' At the time, Chin had taken nearly a year to decide whether to accept the role, telling The Korea Herald in a 2022 interview that she had not expected to return to work in Korea after stepping down as composer-in-residence with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra in 2018, a position she held for 11 years. TIMF's previous artistic directors include German conductor Alexander Liebreich, who became the festival's inaugural artistic director while serving as principal conductor of the Munich Chamber Orchestra, and German cultural manager Florian Riem, who held the role from 2014 to 2020 while also serving as CEO of the foundation. Born in Gimpo in 1961, Chin is one of the most prominent composers of contemporary classical music. She studied composition under Kang Suk-hi at Seoul National University and later with Gyorgy Ligeti in Hamburg, Germany. Her innovative works have earned international acclaim and numerous honors, including the 2004 Grawemeyer Award for her Violin Concerto No. 1, the 2005 Arnold Schönberg Prize and the 2024 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, widely regarded as the 'Nobel Prize of Music.' In addition, "The Unsuk Chin Edition," a comprehensive recording of her works performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, recently won the 2025 International Classical Music Award in the contemporary music category. Her compositions, including the operas "Alice in Wonderland" and "Frontispiece," have been performed worldwide, cementing her reputation as a leading figure in modern classical music. Her upcoming opera — based on the intellectual exchange between physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychoanalyst Carl Jung — is scheduled to premiere this May in Hamburg.
