Soundscape

John Corigliano: Fantasia on an Ostinato; Etude Fantasy; Philip Glass: Metamorphosis One & Two; Brian Field: Three Passions for our Tortured Planet

Kay Kyung Eun Kim (piano)

Steinway STNS30230 55:18 mins

For her debut release on Steinway

Records, South Korean pianist Kay Kyung

Eun Kim has turned to New York, where she lived while studying at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. The Soundscape of the title encompasses classic minimalism via Philip Glass, and its recent incarnation in music by composer-activist Brian Field – as well as its absorption and counterdevelopment in the wry, eclectic post-modernism of John Corigliano.

Glass’s ‘Metamorphosis One’ and ‘Two’ set the scene. Taken from his 1988 five-movement piano suite, and imbued with a cool clarity by Kim, the now-trademark spooling arpeggios and chord sequences have a melancholy that feels remarkably apropos our times. Harmonic gear shifts within and between the two pieces seem not so much a result of simple patterning as manifestations of a continuity subject to fracture.

Based on a theme from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Corigliano’s 1985 Fantasia on an Ostinato seems to offer the same from a very different perspective. In part propelled by his ‘mixed feelings’ about minimalism (at once ‘attractive’ and ‘hypnotic’, yet with ‘excessive repetition and emotional sterility’), it’s a brilliant work. Kim rises superbly to the challenge of its performer-driven structure – as she does to its technical demands and that of the ensuing five-part Etude Fantasy (1976), Corigliano’s thundering cascades and piquant filigree equally lucid.

Field’s Three Pieces for our Tortured Planet (2019) was written for Kim as a global call to climatechange action. A symbol of hope in the midst of despair, its unshowy journey through ‘Fire’, ‘Glaciers’ and ‘Winds’ has been undertaken by tens of pianists thus far, with composer royalties donated to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Steph Power PERFORMANCE

RECORDING