Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Seoul

The Seoul Philharmonic preview their forthcoming US-tour programme, featuring Bomsori Kim playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. 

As a pre‑tour snapshot, this concert proves was unambiguous: an orchestra intent on renewing the canon in the language of now rather than sealing it behind glass. 

An evening at the Seoul Arts Center in which clarity matters as much as volume and the most telling virtuosity comes from a refusal to grandstand.

After Jan Lisiecki clarifies the architecture of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, Renes' Mahler felt like a letter written in the dark. 

Propulsive Prokofiev from pianist Dmitry Shishkin between Ravel’s hypnotic minimalism and Schoenberg’s late-Romantic complexity. 

Fragmentation to ritual: this was no Rite of Spring of two halves but a single, vast architectural crescendo.

From the very first bars of Britten’s Violin Concerto, Augustin Hadelich impresses in Britten's Violin Concerto, yet Jaap van Zweden's Brahms 4 appears misaligned. 

In Yunchan Lim’s hands the score to Rachmaninov's Fourth Piano Concerto emerges as a small revelation, conspicuously succeeding where so many others have floundered. 

Tradition reborn with thrilling clarity: Jakub Hrůša’s Bambergers light up Seoul: Wagner’s shimmering overture, Bomsori Kim’s impassioned Bruch, and a lucid yet explosive Beethoven Seventh. 

By the close of the performance, one sensed that the audience’s exhilaration stemmed less from polished execution and more from a shared immersion in the music’s dramatic arc—elements that lingered as the defining memory of this eventful evening.

At the Seoul Arts Center, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra achieves a luminous balance of historically informed insight and modern orchestral splendour, delivering performances that feel at once deeply rooted and thrillingly alive.

A sumptuous exploration of Saint-Saëns at Lotte Concert Hall in a programme forming a cohesive tapestry woven from the composer’s fascination with colour, all traced back to a distinctly Parisian sensibility. 

Like the grainy intensity of a high-contrast black-and-white photograph, these rugged edges accentuated Mahler’s expressive extremes, reaffirming the conductor’s innate flair for crafting a grand aesthetic narrative within the symphony’s expansive architecture.

Myung-whun Chung and the KBS Symphony Orchestra tackle Mahler’s monumental Resurrection Symphony at the Seoul Arts Center. 

Historical verisimilitude and stylistic consistency might have been somewhat wanting... but the daring spirit and hight artistry prevailed in this historic night of operatic scene in Korea!

The 28th annual concert of the Cross Chamber Orchestra was most praiseworthy in its youthful energy and especially because of the wise choice of soloist; a fascinating feat of religious stoicism and extreme vitality!

The tradition of Grand Opera is well and alive. The genius of Saint-Saëns shone marvellously through this brilliant interpretation, which essentially did justice to the heart of Opera, a dash of madness mixed with high theatricality.

The absence of empty showmanship, of any unnecessary gesture in music making, allowed the listeners to fully experience the essence of Young Gi Kim in a recital of violin sonatas.