Yesse Kim: Back Again and Having Fun

As much as I may have made them seem homogenous in these last ten posts, the various Preludes & Fugues in J.S. Bach's "A Well-Tempered Clavier" do allow a bit of variety for the discerning semifinalist. This shows up both in the interpretation of the piece on stage, and in the music that they're performing in the first place. When Yesse Kim picked out her Prelude and Fugue for performance, returning to the PianoArts stage after a previous appearance in 2010, she did so with a hell of a kick. Kim's interpretation of No. 5 number combined the virtues of being elegant and fast; the notes cascaded out of her piano without feeling rushed, sounded graceful without being overly slow.

Before beginning Beethoven's Sonata No. 24, she gave a brief talk about the piece and you could just tell that she was thrilled to be back. She really nicely characterized the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, trickster nature of the piece, describing it as Beethoven teasing his friends and promising to reveal a secret. When she took her seat at the keyboard and began to play, she did a good job selling that Here I am! (No I'm not) kind of feeling to the audience. The second movement appears in my notes as "blisteringly fast". It incorporated lots of dramatic short pauses after which the pianist soldiers on unscathed.

For her performance of Leon Kirchner's Five Pieces for Piano, Kim threw in another great description of the various movements. I love a good characterization, and Kim first described, then helped the audience see the auctioneer and the despairing man in movements 1 and 2. That latter movement was almost unbearably quiet and full of harmonic pedal noises towards the end. Kim is equally adept at the quiet, evocative pieces and the staggeringly complex ones. She described her performance as a four-course meal, with the Chopin Nocturne at the end as a piece of "chocolate cake". I have never tasted a cake that felt quite so somber as that Nocturne did, but it was nonetheless delicious.