Yeol Eum Son – Ravel: Piano Concertos – Bach/Wittgenstein (2025)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 52:06 minutes | 421 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Naive
Yeol Eum Son’s new album, featuring Ravel’s two piano concertos and Paul Wittgenstein’s left-hand arrangements of four pieces by Bach, is out now on Naïve. Son is joined by musical director Anja Bihlmaier and musicians of the Residentie Orkest The Hague.
For Son, Ravel’s Concertos evokes the horrors of the Great War as much as a moment in her country’s history, the wars that shook the European continent at the beginning of the 20th century echoing her nation’s first independence movements.
In the form of a postlude, the four pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach presented here in arrangements for the left hand alone by Paul Wittgenstein, form more than an escape. They constitute, after the horrors of the destruction, the real moment of reparation.
A few months after finishing his famous Boléro, Maurice Ravel set himself a new challenge: to bring together the two instruments that have always been at the heart of his main occupations, the piano and the orchestra. Two commissioners would ultimately help him: Serge Koussevitzky, the head of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and ardent advocate of the music of his time, for whom Ravel would conceive the Concerto in G major, and Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist born in Vienna in 1887 who, since losing his right hand on the front during a Russian offensive on Poland, had worked to develop the repertoire dedicated to the left hand alone.
Tracklist:
1-1. Yeol Eum Son – Piano Concerto in G Major, M. 83: I. Allegramente (08:55)
1-2. Yeol Eum Son – Piano Concerto in G Major, M. 83: II. Adagio assai (09:17)
1-3. Yeol Eum Son – Piano Concerto in G Major, M. 83: III. Presto (04:12)
1-4. Yeol Eum Son – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major, M. 82 (19:58)
1-5. Yeol Eum Son – Das wohltemperierte Klavier I, Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 846: Prelude (Version for Piano Left Hand by Paul Wittgenstein) (02:17)
1-6. Yeol Eum Son – Prelude in C Minor, BWV 999 (Version for Piano Left Hand by Paul Wittgenstein) (01:21)
1-7. Yeol Eum Son – Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major, BWV 825: VII. Gigue (Version for Piano Left Hand by Paul Wittgenstein) (03:05)
1-8. Yeol Eum Son – Sonata for Flute and Harpsichord in E-Flat Major, BWV 1031: II. Siciliano (Version for Piano Left Hand by Paul Wittgenstein) (02:56)