[News Culture] Mozart’s flashes of exhilaration and depths of loss will travel across nearly 250 years through the hands of two teenage pianists.
Yeseo Nam and Jungwoo Lee will perform in “Beautiful Thursday Young Odyssey: Mozart II” on Aug. 13 at Kumho Art Hall Yonsei in Seoul. Launched this year by the Kumho Cultural Foundation, “Young Odyssey” invites emerging musicians to explore a single composer’s complete cycle of sonatas.
The upcoming program moves through four of Mozart’s 18 piano sonatas in Köchel-number order, with the two pianists alternating onstage. The sequence—from Sonata No. 7 through No. 10—will reveal how Mozart’s emotional language shifts with key, period and circumstance.
Jungwoo Lee opens the recital with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Piano Sonata No. 7 in C Major, K.309.” Written in Mannheim in 1777 with his pupil Rosa Cannabich in mind, the sonata channels the vitality of C major through the forward drive of its opening movement, a second movement shaped around Cannabich’s character and an elegant rondo finale.
Yeseo Nam then takes over with “Piano Sonata No. 8 in A Minor, K.310.” Composed in Paris in 1778, the work is built around a dark emotional current intensified by sharply dotted rhythms and forceful chords.
Nam follows it with “Piano Sonata No. 9 in D Major, K.311,” delivering a dramatic change in temperature. Rapid hand crossings, broad tremolos and concerto-like agility give the work a kinetic brightness that stands in stark contrast to the A-minor sonata.
Lee closes the program with “Piano Sonata No. 10 in C Major, K.330.” Believed to have been written around 1783 in Vienna or Salzburg, the sonata is modest in scale but exacting in execution. Its subtle shifts of expression in the slow movement and tightly controlled balance in the finale test a pianist’s command of the work’s larger architecture.
Both young musicians have already established strong credentials at home and abroad.
Born in 2010, Nam made an invited appearance at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York at the age of 9 and performed in the Kumho Prodigy Concert series in 2025.
“Mozart may sound simple at first, but the human emotions and stories within his music are what make it so beautiful,” Nam said, describing the focus of her interpretation.
Lee, born in 2008, won first prize in Category B—open to pianists aged 22 and under—at the 2024 International Competition for Young Pianists Ettlingen in Germany.
“Mozart’s music has a distinctive purity,” Lee said. “It maintains balance without allowing emotion or expression to lean too far in any one direction.”
Nam’s flair for dramatic emotional shifts and restless momentum will meet Lee’s poised balance and understated humor as the pianists alternate at the keyboard. Their contrasting approaches promise to give audiences a vivid encounter with the many textures of Mozart’s pianistic language.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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