[News Culture] Violinist Yoonhwa Jang will bring together works by Edvard Grieg, Fritz Kreisler, Ludwig van Beethoven and Camille Saint-Saëns in an Oct. 3 recital at Kumho Art Hall Yonsei in Seoul, tracing contrasting approaches to violin writing across the 18th- and 19th-century traditions.
Pianist Geon Kwak joins Jang for the recital, titled Stories Between Music. Rather than concentrating on a single composer or period, the program moves between Nordic Romanticism, historicist virtuoso writing, Classical sonata form and the stylized dance rhythms of the habanera.
The recital opens with Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 45, the last of the composer’s three violin sonatas. Cast in three movements — Allegro molto ed appassionato, Allegretto espressivo alla Romanza and Allegro animato — the work combines tightly worked motivic writing with the rhythmic and melodic inflections associated with Grieg’s Norwegian idiom.
Kreisler’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli in the Style of Tartini follows. Based on a gavotte theme associated with Arcangelo Corelli, the work recasts Baroque material through the lens of Kreisler’s early-20th-century virtuoso style, deploying trills, arpeggiated figuration and multiple stops in a deliberately historical frame.
The second half begins with Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 5 in F Major, Op. 24, widely known as the “Spring” Sonata. Its four-movement design — Allegro, Adagio molto espressivo, Scherzo: Allegro molto and Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo — gives the program its clearest example of Classical sonata construction, with violin and piano treated as closely integrated partners throughout.
Saint-Saëns’ Havanaise in E Major, Op. 83, composed in 1887, closes the recital. Built around the characteristic syncopation of the habanera, the work alternates lyrical episodes with high-register writing, rapid passagework and shifts of articulation that place the violin’s coloristic and technical range at the forefront.
The sequence creates a program shaped less by chronology than by changes in musical language. Grieg’s concentrated Romantic sonata writing gives way to Kreisler’s stylized reconstruction of an earlier idiom; Beethoven restores formal balance at the opening of the second half before Saint-Saëns closes the recital with rhythm and virtuoso display.
Jang studied at Yewon School, Seoul Arts High School and Seoul National University before completing graduate studies at the Aachen campus of the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln in Germany. She previously performed with the Sinfonieorchester Aachen and took part in a 2014 recording project with the string quartet Rendezvous, including music by Grieg.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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