[News Culture] Pianist Dasul Jung will bring together Schumann’s character pieces and Liszt’s spiritually charged piano works in an Oct. 7 recital at the Seoul Arts Center Recital Hall, constructing a program around memory, mourning and religious imagination in 19th-century Romantic music.
The first half is devoted to Robert Schumann, beginning with Vier Klavierstücke, Op. 32. Written around 1838–39, the set comprises a Scherzo, Gigue, Romanze and Fughette, bringing dance forms, lyric writing and contrapuntal procedure into a compact four-piece sequence.
Jung then turns to Schumann’s Nachtstücke, Op. 23, composed in 1839 around the period of his elder brother Eduard’s final illness and death. The title draws on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary world, while the four pieces resist a uniformly dark character: funeral-march gestures and insistent rhythmic figures coexist with rapid movement and passages of intimate lyricism. The result is less a conventional elegy than a shifting psychological study of night, memory and mortality.
The second half moves from mourning toward religious contemplation through three works by Franz Liszt.
Pensée des morts, the fourth piece from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S. 173, takes its title and spiritual premise from Alphonse de Lamartine. Liszt develops the work on an expansive scale, moving between austere declamation, inward meditation and increasingly concentrated religious intensity.
It is followed by Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este I: Thrénodie from Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, S. 163. Inspired by the cypress trees at the Villa d’Este near Rome, the piece belongs to the darker sound world of Liszt’s late music. Its spare textures, chromatic writing and funeral associations place grief at the center of the work without relying on conventional virtuoso display.
The program concludes with St François de Paule marchant sur les flots, the second of Liszt’s Deux Légendes, S. 175. Based on the legend of St. Francis of Paola crossing the Strait of Messina, the work transforms a turbulent accompaniment into the dramatic setting for an increasingly forceful chorale-like idea. Its trajectory from unstable, wave-like motion toward affirmation gives the recital its clearest movement from struggle to transcendence.
Taken together, Jung’s program follows a progression rather than simply grouping Romantic repertoire by composer. Schumann’s compressed character pieces establish a world of memory and psychological instability; Liszt expands that inward focus toward death, lamentation and finally religious faith. The sequence places the changing expressive function of the piano at the center of the recital, from intimate character piece to large-scale spiritual narrative.
Jung studied at Seoul National University before continuing her training in Europe, completing the Konzertexamen at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover and an Artist Diploma at the Imola Piano Academy in Italy.
She was named Soloist of the Year in the classical category by Korean performing-arts magazine Auditorium in 2023. She has also participated in interdisciplinary projects, including Dialogue × Punto Blu II – Beethoven: Waldstein – Repetition, which received the Jury Special Prize in music at the Seoul Arts Awards.
Jung currently teaches at Kyung Hee University, Yewon School and Seoul Arts High School. She is also a faculty member of the Musicalta music festival and academy in France and serves as music director of the Gangbuk Cultural Foundation’s matinee concert series.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
Copyright ⓒ 뉴스컬처 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지
