A Seoul man comes home
Vallejo native Jared Redmond, a resident of South Korea's capital, performs with the Vallejo Symphony
Famed 20th-century novelist Thomas Wolfe famously wrote “You Can't Go Home Again.”
Vallejo native and musician Jared Redmond must not have read it.
Based in Seoul, South Korea, he certainly does not ascribe to the idea expressed in the title, since Redmond will perform Scriabin's Piano Concerto in F sharp minor this weekend with the Vallejo Symphony, the orchestra's last concert of its current season.
It's unclear if Redmond may have read Wolfe's “Look Homeward, Angel,” but, in an interview earlier this week from a Berkeley residence, he said, “Coming back is kind of a huge cyclical thing. So I'm very excited about it.”
Besides the Scriabin, the Russian composer's only true concerto and his first work that involved the orchestra, the concert, dubbed “Fate” and led by conductor Marc Taddei, includes symphony composer-in-residence Trey Makler's “Pixie” and Beethoven's rousing Symphony No. 5 in C minor, with its four-note opening theme — dah-dah-dahdum — sometimes called “the sound of Fate knocking on the door” and is perhaps some of the best-known classical music of all time.
Redmond admitted he is an ardent fan of Scriabin, who died in his early 40s in 1915 of a lip tumor, and has performed the 1896 piano concerto many times, adding that it contains clear
echoes of Chopin and Rachmaninoff, the latter a student friend. Yet it is distinctly different from Scriabin's later works influenced by “theosophy,” an occult movement in the late 19th century, and his pursuit of “the mystic chord,” coloring such compositions as “The Mysterium” and “Prometheus — The Poem of Fire.”
The concerto's first movement is noted for its contrasting moods and tension, ending darkly, while the second is more poetic, slower, with four brief variations, and the third and final movement is more expressive, propelled by sweeping cascades of sound, lyrical interludes, and ending with the soloist's final two chords, all of it clocking in at about 28 minutes.
Redmond, who is in his late 30s, will be in rehearsal this week and, he said, “I'm preparing myself and performing it quite a lot. I want to be as prepared as I can for the first rehearsal.”
A graduate of UC Berkeley and Brandeis University who later lived in Germany for a time, Redmond, who also composes, teaches and performs internationally, champions living composers alongside those of the standard repertoire.
Of the modern composers
he admires, he cites England's Michael Finnissy, the American Caroline Chen, and South Korea's Unsuk Chin, whom he called “a very famous composer living in Germany.”
An instructor at the Seoul National University School of Music, Redmond, who grew up in Napa and was homeschooled, said he has written pieces for traditional Korean instruments, adding, “I'm interested in all kinds of music.”
“I have a deep grounding in classical music,” he said. “My parents both loved music. When I met my major piano teacher, I had an almost guru-like relationship with him.”
On some days, after a three-hour lesson the previous day, Redmond would return for another three-hour session.
“It changed my life,” he said of that early musical education. “A lot. It was a big deal and went on to influence my life. I got lucky at age 12 and met him by accident. He went to my parents and said, `Your kid has promise but needs some mentoring and guidance.' So I started my studies around him. We still have a relationship and we keep in touch. He was the one who originally turned
me on to Scriabin as a composer.”
Redmond called his interest in Scriabin “my gateway drug into Russian music,” a composer whose works American critic and composer Virgil Thomson called “harmonically original” but lack “true rhythmic life.”
Thomson, said Redmond, composed “rhythmically vivacious” music, whereas Scriabin's sound is “melting, floating along in a half-perfumed 19th-century opium den, dreamy, psychedelic, strange and beautiful.”
Asked what he has learned writing Western avant-garde music for traditional Korean instruments, Redmond said it included the human voice.
“There's a lot of diversity in Korean music,” he said. “Folk singing … Imagine a good blues singer, raspy, and a singer singing aristocratic music that is almost unemotional, very lean and very very controlled and elegant.”
Redmond, whose wife Mallo is a painter and sculptor, was unsure where he would be living in the coming years, but added, “It would be lovely to come back to the Bay Area one day.”
By then, he may adhere to Wolfe's “Look Homeward, Angel.”