PRESS

The young pianist Kevin Lee Sun has chosen the technically and interpretively demanding American masterpiece of Frederic Rzewski for his first commercial recording. Given his DMA from Eastman and piano studies with Thomas Schultz at Stanford University, he gave me in-depth and informative answers to my questions about Rzewski, and specifically his incredible set of variations on the Chilean song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún.

This is your debut album release. Please tell us a little about your musical background.

I’m relatively new to music as a career. I was in medical school studying to be a child psychiatrist as recently as 2020. But since I was 5 years old, I have always been playing the piano. It is a necessary part of my life.

My childhood featured classical piano quite heavily, and I participated in competitions and summer workshops. But I practiced about two hours per day on average, which is not so much compared to child prodigies. The rest of my days were spent seriously studying literature, history, foreign languages, mathematics, and sciences in the very fine public schools of Sacramento, CA. Music was simply a part of my humanistic education growing up.

My musical experience at Stanford University turned out to be pivotal, and my piano studies with faculty member Thomas Schultz were very influential. He himself had worked closely with Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff, and he introduced me to countless composers I had never heard of. Thomas Schultz took me and a few other students to Vienna in 2014, to study and perform works of the Second Viennese School, and there I presented Hanns Eisler’s Third Piano Sonata, as well as four-hand works by Stravinsky and J. M. Hauer.

I earned my master’s degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music studying with Sharon Mann, and then my doctorate at the Eastman School of Music studying with Alexander Kobrin. I mostly studied works of the classical canon in those institutions, but at Eastman I did perform Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, as well as works by the living composer Hyo-shin Na. Over time, I have been coming to find a balance between traditional masterworks and contemporary music, especially music that is humanistic and socially relevant. My interest in this kind of music led me to record Frederic Rzewski’s work The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975).

Rzewski died in 2021 and left us over 50 major piano pieces (some consisting of many individual compositions). These were written in many styles between 1953 and 2021. Would you speak about his importance in the history of American piano music?

I honestly have not been alive very long, so it is difficult for me to answer this question with much personal experience or hindsight. I really do not know if Rzewski’s music has been so influential in American compositional circles. It certainly is not as much played or celebrated as that of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, which is a real shame. Some young composers I have met had never heard of Rzewski. But I think The People United Will Never Be Defeated! has real staying power. Its global significance in combining its Chilean theme with Italian and German solidarity songs, its inclusion of all sorts of 20th-century styles from Minimalism to jazz, and its sheer technical demands, all make it a Mount Everest of sorts to climb in terms of American piano music. I hope my recording makes all these elements clear.

Rzewski has written many other fine piano pieces too, especially his four North American Ballads (1978–79), Four Pieces (1977), and De Profundis (1991–92). What makes these so important are their combinations of sociopolitical themes and variety of modern piano techniques, which are often used with heightened expressive intention.

Can you reflect on the technical difficulties in Rzewski’s piano writing, including his addition of optional vocal sounds and an optional improvised cadenza before the final statement of the Thema in The People United Will Never Be Defeated?

Rzewski’s piano writing for this specific piece is incisively clear. The textures are quite thin, and it is very common for each hand to be playing only one note at a time in the piece. The piece derives its expressive intensity more from its counterpoint, its dynamic range, and its rhetorical gestures than from traditional melody and harmony. This deviation from classical norms is really what makes the writing difficult to play, more so than the actual number of notes or the speed at which the notes must be played. Because the music is so clear and immediate, each gesture, no matter how small, must carry meaning, often independently of harmony. What this means technically is that the piece requires a wide variety of articulation, a huge dynamic range with sudden changes, and very careful pedaling technique. Through satisfying these requirements, the rhetoric of the music can be appreciated.

I do not perform the optional vocal sounds or the optional improvised cadenza in my album recording. I have found these elements to be far overemphasized by people who talk about the piece. The vocal sounds appear in four of the 36 variations, and in total they last no more than 20 seconds; my recording is 63 minutes long. I did not choose to make the vocal sounds because I believe they distract from what I am trying to do in my interpretation, which is to highlight the dynamic and timbral extremities of the piano, so that the suffering and uncertainty that Chileans felt in the 1970s become clear. The vocal sounds, in my opinion, support more of a geopolitical and protest narrative to the piece; this is not the primary motivation of my interpretation. I did not improvise a cadenza because the way I play the final variation, No. 36, is sufficiently disorienting yet summative, and because I play the final statement of the Thema in a way that slowly builds in intensity. In my interpretation, necessarily, the return of the theme slowly emerges from the fragments and memories of Variation 36.

Rzewski wrote that “there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could be understood by a wide variety of listeners.” Would you comment on how that thought pertains to The People United Will Never Be Defeated?

When I first heard my teacher Thomas Schultz perform this piece, I readily appreciated the structure of the entire hour-long set of variations. The 36 variations are set up in sets of six. The sixth variation of every set (Nos. 6, 12, 18, etc.) is a summation of the motives and characters of the previous five. In the final set of variations (Nos. 31–36), Rzewski employs a very interesting structure: No. 31, the first of this final set, sums up the first variation in each of the previous 5 sets (Nos. 1, 7, 13, 19, and 25). No. 32 sums up the second variation of each set, and so on.

While this sounds abstract, difficult, and complex, in practice, Rzewski has made this structure understandable because of how memorable each variation’s motif is, and because of his intelligent use of reminders every six variations. By the end of the piece, we have heard each variation’s main idea and character four times.

Rzewski’s music often incorporates social and political themes, as evidenced by The People United Will Never Be Defeated. What are your thoughts on his inspiration for this remarkable composition?

I hesitate to speculate about a composer’s inspirations and development. A person’s mind is very complicated, and I do not want to reduce Rzewski’s thinking into misleading statements. That said, Rzewski showed a clear interest in writing sociopolitical music after returning to New York from Italy in 1971. Works that deal with social themes include his Coming Together (1971) and Attica (1972), which are both settings of letters by the Attica State Prison inmate Sam Melville; and his Struggle Song (1973). It is no wonder then that when Rzewski experienced Inti-Illimani’s performance of “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” at Hunter College in 1974, he was primed both to appreciate it and to interact with it.

Rzewski’s classical training also contributed to this composition. He understood the greatness of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, so when he was asked by Ursula Oppens to write a companion piece to that masterwork, he knew what he was getting himself into. He also had studied Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Princeton University. In Gerd Conradt’s 2015 film Turn Your Eyes to the Present, which can be found online, Rzewski says, “I see myself actually as being in the mainstream of the classical tradition, because I am doing what Bach and Beethoven did. I’m creating a new music—doing something new with the tradition. So ever since I can remember, that’s what I do. I wanted to be like Beethoven—I remember that very clearly—when I was seven years old.” The combination of Rzewski’s vast geopolitical consciousness and long appreciation for the classical tradition is perhaps the most factual thing I can say about his inspiration for this piece.

You have medical training and have written about child and adolescent psychiatry. Do you have strong feelings about the benefits of musical training for young people?

I am not sure if musical training has unique benefits when compared with other forms of artistic training or even sports. But I do believe aspects of good musical training can be beneficial for a young person’s mental health. There is some relation between those elements and the four skills taught in dialectical behavior therapy: mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotion regulation. Deliberate practice may improve mindfulness. Exposure to anxiety-inducing performance situations may improve distress tolerance. Working with teachers, peers, and collaborators open-mindedly may improve interpersonal effectiveness. And empathizing with the emotions in other people’s music, and then performing them, may improve emotion regulation. Just like almost any other aspect of a young person’s life, musical training requires a balance of positive strengths-based approaches, supportive and actionable feedback, and learning supports and accommodations in order for the above assertions to be true.

There also seems to be some relation between neurodiversity and music. Neurodivergent people—including autistic people, people with ADHD, and people with other conditions—are overrepresented in music, especially classical music and jazz. Describing music as “beneficial” for these neurodivergent people may be really selling short a lot of interest and talent in music that many of them have. If anything, the beautiful minds and incredible efforts of young neurodivergent people are of benefit to music.

With your teaching and performance schedules, what personal, extra-musical activities are you able to engage in?

I read Japanese manga daily to spark my visual and narrative imagination. I’ve been reading these pieces of art for almost 25 years now. I occasionally write poetry, though badly. And I am just now beginning to practice yoga in the evenings to calm my spirit. I was inspired to do so by the living composer Colin Kemper, with whom I’m currently collaborating, and whose music deals with mental wellness and emotional intimacy, among other things.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’d never heard Frederic Rzewski’s monumental The People United Will Never Be Defeated! until I got this CD for review. It had always rested on the back burner of my consciousness, even though I’m generally in sympathy with Rzewski’s progressive politics that inspired the work. I’ve been to plenty of demonstrations at which the title chant is recited—though all too often it’s mistakenly spoken as “The People United Will Never Be Divided.”

The People United Will Never Be Defeated! began life as a street chant in Chile during the short-lived presidency of Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. In June 1973, three months before Allende was violently overthrown and murdered in a military coup authorized by then U.S. president Richard Nixon and the CIA, Sergio Ortega heard the chant at a pro-Allende demonstration and decided to set it to music for his band, the Chilean nueva canción (“new song”) ensemble Quilapayún. 

In 1974, a year after Allende had been brutally murdered and replaced by dictator Augusto Pinochet, Frederic Rzewski and his friend, fellow pianist Ursula Oppens, went to a concert at Hunter College in New York City at which another Chilean folk ensemble, Inti-Illimani, performed the song. “We walked out onto the street singing the melody, and it never left us from that time on,” Rzewski recalled. When Oppens asked Rzewski to write him a piece she could play as a companion to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, he chose The People United as the basis of his work. 

Rzewski came up with a work of over an hour in which Ortega’s tune would be put through 36 variations, divided into six sets of six variations each. The musical language would range freely through the landscape of 20th-century music, mostly tonal but venturing into Lisztian chromaticism and free atonality. Oppens premiered the work at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in February 1976, and it went on to become a classical music standard, one of the few extended piano pieces from the 20th century to be part of the overall musical literature.

The Wikipedia page on The People United Will Never Be Defeated! lists 17 recordings before this one, including three by Rzewski (for hat HUT, Nonesuch, and a video performance from the 2007 International Piano Festival in Miami) and two by Oppens (for Vanguard and Çedille). It’s a work that’s been embraced not only by 20th-century music specialists but such standard repertory players as Marc-André Hamelin and Igor Levit. Indeed, Levit released his version as part of a three-CD set that also contained Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the pieces to which The People United is most frequently compared.

Though its message about the fragility of democracy and the need to resist authoritarian attempts to undo it is seemingly universal, pianist Kevin Lee Sun is emphatic in his liner notes that he interprets it strictly as a comment on the oppression of the Chilean people under Pinochet and his U.S.-sponsored rule. “Recorded in 2023, 50 years after the 1973 coup d’état, this interpretation seeks to capture the suffering and the uncertainty of a time when Chileans felt the effects of Richard Nixon’s directions to ‘make the economy scream’; when Chileans knew a coup was in the works and then watched the bombings of the Presidential palace happen; when Chileans ‘disappeared’ and were tortured under the resulting Pinochet regime,” Sun wrote.

He also said he was inspired by The House of the Spirits (1982), the debut novel by Isabel Allende (a relative of the late President; her father Tomás had been Salvador’s first cousin), written in exile in Venezuela after she fled Pinochet’s brutal regime. Sun cites two passages in Isabel Allende’s novel that directly reference the street chant and Ortega’s musical setting of it. I think the best part of The People United is the lyrical, transcendent third set of variations (tracks 14 through 19), in which Rzewski rephrases Ortega’s melody to sound much like the African-American spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and achieves a haunting effect. Sun phrases these variations with the delicate poetry they deserve while bringing to the rest of the piece the force it needs.

Kevin Lee Sun’s recording of The People United is his debut CD. He was born in Sacramento, California and studied biology and classics at Stanford University in Palo Alto before pursuing music at the San Francisco Conservatory. In 2011 he won the silver medal at the Virginia Waring International Piano Competition, and 10 years later he was the only pianist to be named as a finalist for the Berlin Prize for Young Artists in Germany. In 2023 Sun was hired as an assistant professor of piano at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Sun has an easy command of the intricacies of Rzewski’s piece and in particular its diversity of styles, from pure lyricism to nearly atonal banging. The only other recording I was able to hear for comparison was Marc-André Hamelin’s, which has been criticized for making the piece sound too popular and smoothing out the rough edges of Rzewski’s score. While Sun, like Hamelin, integrates Rzewski’s calls in the score for vocalisms and percussive piano slams into the piece instead of letting them stand out, Sun seems more alive both to the overall political agenda of the work and its strictly musical qualities. Navona Records’ recording makes the piano sound rather jangly at first—perhaps intentionally—but soon it calms down and does justice to Sun’s rich piano sound.

Kevin Lee Sun delivers an electrifying call to action in THE PEOPLE UNITED, a monumental set of 36 variations by the late American composer Frederic Rzewski. Its theme originated in Chile when composer Sergio Ortega heard the soul-stirring chants in Santiago, months before the 1973 Chilean coup d’etat. Inspired by Ortega’s music and Chile’s upheavals, Rzewski combined the chant with revolutionary songs from various cultures to deliver a clear message of solidarity in his 1975 hour-long masterpiece, eponymously named The People United Will Never Be Defeated!

Today, Kevin is our featured artist in the “Inside Story,” a blog series exploring the inner workings and personalities of our composers and performers. Read on to learn about the inspiration he draws from experiencing art made by friends, and the various aspects he hopes listeners will discover within his Navona Records release… 

If you weren’t a musician, what would you be doing?

I’ve always been interested in other cultures, ancient civilizations, and people whose customs are so different that it makes you rethink everything. So perhaps I’d be an archaeologist, a foreign affairs journalist, or a diplomat. (Although, I’m probably a bit too fiery for successful diplomacy!)

If you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be?

I’ve had really fruitful collaborations already with my dear friend based in San Francisco named Angela Liu, who has immense talent in the visual arts. Her own interests and projects have often previsaged my musical concepts. But if it has to be someone else, it sounds a little basic but probably installation artists like James Terrell or teamLab, who could provide a different dimension to my music-making.

What emotions do you hope listeners will experience after hearing your work?

Uneasiness, searching, energy with a little freneticism, compassion, resolution — an emotional narrative of some sort, though not always a nice and pleasant one.

Where and when are you at your most creative?

Connections leading to creativity form spontaneously with no real ritual. But experiencing art made by friends whom I love is undoubtedly inspiring. Reading the news and absorbing others’ stories are processes that help initial ideas fractalize into musical programs and projects. Apple’s Notes app has been my conduit for all of these thoughts for years.

What are your other passions besides music?

Music is simply the medium that I chose to act on my larger passions of understanding other people, appreciating their differences, and helping them. For the same reasons, I’ve done research in child and adolescent psychiatry, and I’ve studied and written about ancient Greek pedagogical texts (Plato, Archimedes, etc.).

What musical mentor had the greatest impact on your artistic journey? Is there any wisdom they’ve imparted onto you that still resonates today?

That would be Thomas Schultz, my piano teacher at Stanford, and a real artist who has performed music by Cage, Stockhausen, Rzewski, Wolff, Hyo-shin Na, and so many other great composers of the 20th century. He opened my mind to music beyond the traditional canon, and guided me to appreciate the unusual. I learned just as much from his readings of poetry and his recommendations of films, as I did from his suggestions and demonstrations at the piano. Trying to encapsulate his wisdom as pithy aphorisms somehow feels almost antithetical to how he taught me to think and to question.

I've been to so damn many concerts recently that I can't keep them straight. But one stands out.

This past Monday I went to a harpsichord recital at a home in Orinda. Zach Weiner was there, and I asked him if he was going to hear Rzewski's 'The People United' variations at 405 Shrader on Friday. He didn't know about this and asked who was playing. I said someone I hadn't heard of - Kevin Lee Sun. The guy next to Zach spoke up and said "that's me!". Small world. Turns out they know each other from Stanford undergrad. Kevin went on to med school but left to to pursue music, and is now a music prof at Duquesne.

So on Friday Maryse and I went to hear Kevin play the variations. It was, for me, a wonderful and powerfully inspiring experience.

...

405 Shrader is a small room with a Grotrian 7' piano. The place was packed. I got a glass of wine and settled in.

Kevin's performance was absolutely great. He feels and expresses the volcanic power of the piece, and he has the chops to play it exactly as he conceives it. The proximity of the piano and its volume made it a visceral and almost overwhelming experience.

...

When the piece ended, there was stunned silence, then riotous applause that lasted a LONG time.

There was wonderful socializing afterward. I talked with Kevin's father, from Beijing and now living in Sacramento. He acknowledged having initial doubts about Kevin's career choice. I talked with Michael Milenski, the proprietor of 405 Shrader, an intense intellectual/radical who reminds me a lot of myself.

Wow! Great event. This is why I go to concerts.

...Sun’s program also accentuated the folk music idioms that factored into the works he played by Hyo-shin Na, Leoš Janáček, Frederic Rzewski, and Schumann. They serve as wayfinders for the emotional truths, such as the beer-hall irony of Pete Seeger’s “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” barreling its way into Rzewski’s work of the same name, which Sun tore through with unfiltered frenzy. These mechanics complemented Na’s “Rain Study,” in which lyricism cuts through a stormy humidity like sunlight filtering through a diaphanous curtain, and the brute force and hellish rage of Rzewski resolved into a balm of two selections from Schumann’s “Gesänge der Frühe.” It was a tender, quiet relief that extended past Sun’s program into the other worlds...

#30Bach, Episode 11, Variations 22-24: Interview with polymath pianist Kevin Lee Sun. We discuss sources of joy in Bach’s life, and his ability to conjure joy, warmth, and humor in his music as an antidote to the tragedy that follows.

Kevin Lee Sun made quite a splash when he won the Grand Prize in the Carmel Music Society’s 2018 Biennial Piano Competition, and he reinforced this positive impression when he appeared as a recitalist on the Music Society’s regular concert season in January 2019. It was, however, noted in 2019, that Sun’s programming for this recital was odd. The most dramatic works that should have ended the program were scheduled in the first half so that the more problematic selections ended the program with a whimper rather than a bang. It so puzzled the audience that at the end of the program there was a weak standing ovation and no encore.

Well, in his recital yesterday afternoon for the Aptos Keyboard Series at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist, he certainly got the programming concept right this time. Starting off with a slightly neutral performance of the Bach Toccata in F-sharp minor, BWV 910, an early work, Sun informed us, that might have originally been conceived for organ and influenced by Bach’s trip (250 miles on foot) to spend some time admiring the craftsmanship of Dieterich Buxtehude. The Bach Toccata was followed by an intense performance of Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, D. 845. From its very first notes we heard elegant and sensitive shaping of song-like phrases as well as lots of Sturm und Drang in the more passionate sections. 

It was after intermission that Sun had his finest moments. The great surprise of the afternoon was his performance of a contemporary work, Rain Study, composed by Hyo-shin Na in 1999. Sun informed the audience that this work contained Korean idioms merged with western traditions and its central theme was the brevity of life — “Although the sun that sets will rise the next day, a life that passes will not rise again.” 

This work featured a weaving in and out of sonorities that were constantly interrupted by melodic fragments and dissonant clusters of notes. The lovely ending of this work gave us an uneasy serenity as its final moments drifted off silently into the ether.

The program ended with a passionate and large-scaled performance of Schumann’s Kreisleriana — I say “large-scaled” because there were some strident percussive passages that threatened to overwhelm the piano. But, Sun’s performance was focussed and artistic in its absolute control of the eight sections of this work, each with its own charm and magic.

Sun took us on a wild journey, and we enjoyed it.

THE WINNER of the 2018 Carmel Music Society piano competition, Kevin Lee Sun, redeemed his winning solo recital on Sunday afternoon with an oddly arcane program, a gutsy move to be sure since the audience thinned out considerably at intermission. Yet this young man, who played his entire program from memory, certainly has the talent, skills and multi-award-winning performance track record with which to make a career—unless he chooses in favor of medicine instead. (Nice to have so many choices on your plate at age 25!)  

Arcane though it was, Sun’s program followed a certain logic. The first prelude and fugue from JS Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, whetted the ear, to be followed immediately by the Fantasia after JS Bach by Ferruccio Busoni, concocted in 1909. The piece references Bach’s use of three chorales, including “Christ, du bist der helle Tag” and  “Lob se idem allmächtigen Gott.”  But the most immediately recognizable was the advent carol “Gottes Sohn ist kommen,” whose melody, sung every Christmas season in a version known as “In dulce jubilo,” dates to the early 14th century and, for Bach and his contemporaries, was frequently harmonized as chorales. However, this conflation of Bach and Busoni is a pretentiously muddled affair—16 minutes in a performance that felt like 24, though no fault of Sun—appealing primarily to hot-shot virtuosi like Marc-André Hamelin whose glitz alone often carries the water for otherwise neglected piano composers of yesteryear. Frankly it’s a hard piece to take seriously; Bach barely rescues Busoni from himself. Sun, who plays with probing seriousness, should build his career on a sounder foundation.

(Meanwhile, I was dismayed and distracted by ushers seating late-comers into the auditorium ten minutes into the Busoni with noisy whispering, and, in the following Schubert, patrons making high-held cell-phone videos of the performance. Apparently, Sunset Center’s previously stated policies are no longer being enforced.)     

Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy, D760, also a muddle of form as the musical term ‘fantasy’ usually implies—in this case sonata comingled with theme and variations—vacillates between major and minor. Nominally based on the composer’s earlier song, Der Wanderer, the 20-minute bluster sounds like a forced amalgam of Schubert and Beethoven and suffers from a near-inability to find which of the many suggested endings is the right one. As a great and loving fan of Schubert, I find this piece about as non-idiomatic of the composer’s natural style as one could get, though Sun muscled up big-time for the occasion.

Sun’s piano teacher at Stanford, Thomas Schultz, had every reason to take pride in his pupil, including the inclusion on the program of Variations (1990) by Hyo-Shin Na, Schultz’s Korean-born wife and a fine composer on her own terms. Absent program notes for the concert, one had to catch the piece on the fly. It was based essentially on an angular pentatonic theme of Korean or Chinese character, and arguably was the most truly confident performance by the pianist. A high point of the program it fed ears hungry for something fresh and, in modern terms, original.

Brahms’ early Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9, of 1854—Brahms was 21—is based on a the fourth of Schumann’s Bunte Blătter, (Album leaves) , and precociously mourns the untimely loss of his principal mentor. To close his recital, Sun chose the Romance No. 2 from Schumann’s Thee Romances, Op. 28, love-letters to his soon-to-be wife Clara just before her 21st birthday. Clara wrote to him on 1 January 1840 ‘… as your bride, you must indeed dedicate something further to me, and I know of nothing more tender than these 3 Romances, in particular the middle one, which is the most beautiful love duet.” As Brahms reminds us over and again, Schumann’s was one of the most original voices of the “romantic” 19th century.

2018 Carmel Music Society Biennial Piano Competition winner Kevin Lee Sun appeared in recital yesterday afternoon at Sunset Center. It was, in retrospect, an oddly chosen program. The works on the first half, consisting of a Prelude & Fugue from Bach’s WTC II, the Fantasia nach J.S. Bach by Busoni and Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy,” were totally involving and demonstrated Sun’s ability to paint with a stunningly beautiful palette of colors while demonstrating a seemingly effortless total keyboard mastery. At the end of the first half, spontaneous bravos erupted from members of the audience, and he received a thunderous standing ovation.

These repertoire selections should have ended the program, because the works Sun performed on the second half — sets of variations by Hyo-shin Na and Brahms, plus a bland Romance by Schumann — were about as exciting as a firecracker on the Fifth of July. Although most artists would plan to end a recital, not with a whimper, but with a bang, both the Brahms Variations and the Schumann Romance faded away so quietly the audience seemed to be genuinely surprised when they were over, and not sure when to applaud. At the end of the concert there was a standing ovation, but the applause quickly faded, and there was no encore.

Unquestionably, Sun is a total musician from his toes to his fingertips, and his virtuosity knows no bounds. Most importantly, his virtuosity is often understated, since he uses it to serve and enhance the music and never for gratuitous display. His performance of the Bach Prelude & Fugue in C Major, BWV 870, was so natural and charming, you were genuinely sorry when it was over. His performance of Busoni’s Fantasia nach J.S. Bach was a revelation, for most of us in the audience were hearing this work for the first time and didn’t know quite what to expect. We heard homage to Bach with a definite romantic slant and a slight modern perspective. This performance pulled us into its spiritual core and immersed us in lovely, colorful solemnity until it finally reached a beautiful quiet ending that seemed inevitable and totally satisfying.

The greatest work on the program was Schubert’s mighty Wanderer Fantasie, Op. 15, one of the marvels of the piano literature. Although it is a work that some artists overplay and weaken with relentless pounding and excessive speed, Sun showed noble restraint that brought out the best moments in the setting of the the song that inspired the work, as well as in all the fiery Sturm und Drang that surrounds it. This was a gorgeous and masterful performance with beautiful cantabile and shaping of phrases. This was the best performance of this this work I have ever heard, and it was a performance I never wanted to end.

The novelty on the program was a set of variations by Hyo-shin Na, the wife of Kevin’s piano teacher at Stanford, Thomas Schultz. This was a 13-minute, well-crafted piece that began with an extended solo for left hand alone that bounced all over the keyboard while strongly favoring the bass register of the piano. The style was strongly rhythmic with punched out disjointed intervals that suggested a twentieth-century tone row on meth. Except for brief quasi-lyrical, moments of lyricism at four minutes and eleven minutes into the work, these variations pulled no punches. Although this is a challenging piece for the performer (and the audience as well), Kevin Lee Sun easily navigated his way through its thorny difficulties and managed to make it sound like a coherent and appealing work.

We would love to hear Kevin Lee Sun in a return engagement, and perhaps next time we could persuade him to play some Chopin. Speaking with him briefly after the concert, I asked him about Chopin. He smiled and made a dismissive gesture with his hand saying, “There is already too much Chopin.” I don’t agree with him about this. Alan Walker in his recently-published biography of Chopin says in his preface. “Wherever I am on earth, someone within a fifty-mile radius is either listening to or playing a work by Chopin.”

It was a grand occasion for local piano buffs yesterday when the Carmel Music Society held its 40th Piano Competition at Sunset Center. Six finalists competed from 10:30 am to 3:00 pm, each playing a half-hour solo program. At 3:30 Dr. Anne Thorp, Co-President of the Carmel Music Society announced that the judges had selected 24-year-old Kevin Lee Sun from Sacramento as the Grand Prize Winner, who, in addition to his cash award, will be returning to Sunset Center at 3:00 pm on Sunday, January 13, 2019 to perform a full recital on the CMS regular subscription series. Dr. Thorp then announced that 29-year-old Xiao Chen, who holds a Master of Music degree from Juilliard and a DMA from UCLA, was awarded Second Prize, and 19-year-old Christopher Richardson, a much lauded competition winner who is currently a pre-med student at UC Berkeley, was awarded Third Prize.

...

After intermission we had an opportunity to hear Grand Prize Winner Kevin [Lee] Sun, who also seemed to have three different personas inhabiting his artistic soul. He played an elegant, extroverted Overture to Bach’s Partita No. 4, two lovely and expressive selections from Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke, D.946, and finally an over-the-top performance of the Gigue from Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25. I normally wouldn’t go out of my way to hear any of Schoenberg’s piano works. But, I shamefully admit my prejudice was misguided, and it was Kevin Sun who showed me the error of my ways. His performance of the Gigue was an eye-opening (and ear-opening) experience. We will look forward to his appearance in January for the CMS.

...

Every now and then one encounters a student recital so imaginatively conceived and so confidently executed that it burns its way into mind’s long-term memory. Such was the case last night in the Osher Salon at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where graduating senior Edward Luengo presented his end-of-term cello recital. With a repertoire that allowed for four musical partners and extended from the end of the eighteenth century to the first decade of the current one, Luengo provided himself with a richly diverse palette with which to exercise his technical and expressive skills, both of which were firing on all cylinders.

The major works in each half of the program offered a stimulating balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The second half was dominated by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 99 (second) sonata in F major. Separated by two decades, one might say (at the risk of sounding too reductive) that the first of the cello sonatas (Opus 38 in E minor) is highly introverted, while Opus 99 is vigorously extroverted. There is even an energetic buzz to the pizzicato passages in the second (Adagio affettuoso) that seems to invite the listener into what might have been taken as a private space.

The fact is that each movement has its own characteristic set of personality traits. Working effectively with accompanist Kevin Lee Sun, Luengo knew how to mine each movement for its own individual traits and then tie them all together in his journey through the sonata’s four movements. This was a delightful reminder that, no matter how many times one has previously encountered this sonata, there will always be fresh ways to enjoy the listening experience.

...