Friday, November 21, 2025
Lotte Concert Hall, Seoul, South Korea
The centrepiece was Eric Lu (2025 19th Chopin Competition Winner) as soloist in the eponymous composer’s Concerto No.2, which he played in the Finals and then in the Gala. In Seoul, to an expressive and smart accompaniment, he gave a robust, dreamy and – as befits a player who had already enjoyed success before Warsaw – seasoned traversal, if slightly anonymous, the lilt of the Finale aside, with a characterful bassoon counterpoint towards the end of the slow movement, and also a confident horn-signal to cue the dancing coda. Lu’s encore was a static reading of the bookending ‘Aria’ from Bach’s Goldberg set, rather naked without the following/intervening Variations.
The concert started with the Korean premiere of Cindy McTee’s Circuits, continuing to spark with colourful and rhythmic incident, and, following the interval, Shostakovich Eleven, a cinematic evocation of the (failed) 1905 Russian Revolution (success would come in 1917), here atmospheric, tense, and graphic, just occasionally with some solos a tad fallible if collectively eloquent and emotionally acute in the third movement, ‘Memory Eternal’ – a requiem for those massacred in the preceding ‘The 9th of January’, a “bloody Sunday” – riposted by the final ‘Tocsin’, tremendously bold here, KBS members giving their all. Following the cor anglais’s expressive lament, the bell-capped coda rang out, the metallic overhang clapped into but it soon ceased through what I imagine was a nifty bit of crowd-control on Leonard Slatkin’s part.
Pretty good radio sound courtesy of the Korean Broadcasting System, yet the loudest onslaughts of the Shostakovich were challenged dynamically, although it’s not difficult to imagine all guns were blazing in the (over-reverberant) Hall. Otherwise, nothing confidential to report: even if there were I would be the Seoul of discretion.