Younghi Pagh-Paan celebrated as Busan Philharmonic concludes Musikfest Berlin

It is not every day that one gets to hear music by a Korean composer, let alone a contemporary female composer attending the event. Such was the case at the concert with the Busan Philharmonic Orchestra which concluded this year’s Musikfest Berlin. Indeed, the concert was in celebration of Younghi Pagh-Paan’s 80th birthday.

Younghi Pagh-Paan was studying in Germany in 1980, having been granted the first commission ever to a female composer by the Donaueschingen Musiktage, when she heard of the student uprising against the military dictatorship in Korea and the subsequent brutal massacre of almost 2000 that followed. The emotional impact of these actions influenced her musical language. She called her composition Sori, meaning “voice, call, cry”. It has a percussion section of 34 instruments, including dried peas in a bongo drum, hanging bamboo reeds, antique cymbals, lotus flute, Korean bells and several whistles. Her aim was to embed her music in life, combined with techniques and complex freedom of the avant garde.

The second, more recent work dates from 2022-23 and is called Woman, why are you crying?, also commissioned by Donaueschingen. It is a seven-minute composition for large orchestra in which the composer comes to terms with the loss of her husband and overcoming illness. It refers to the Gospel of John, where Mary Magdalene weeps at the open tomb, and is about the comfort that the act of weeping brings. Far from a plaintive melody, it combines tremendous drama with a complex woven string polyphony.

American-Korean pianist Ben Kim performed Ravel’s Piano Concerto in D major for the left hand. As a student of the legendary Leon Fleisher, it is no wonder that his interpretation was as brilliant as it was emotionally riveting. This concerto has many references to one of Ravel’s other seminal works, Boléro, composed around the same time. Both reflect the composer’s fascination with orchestral colour as a structural device, whereby the concerto tells a story of struggle, loss and triumph, shaped as much by timbre as by harmony. The piano, restricted to the left hand, is written in such a way that it sounds like two hands at once – massive chordal textures, wide leaps and brilliant figuration, all mastered with fluid drama by Kim.

After intermission, it was time for Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension, premiered in 1935 in Paris. Still in his early twenties and deeply religious, Messiaen already reveals the essence of his musical language here: a profession of faith in radiant icons of sound. The subject is the Ascension of Christ, but Messiaen does not narrate the biblical story; instead, he contemplates it in four fervent tableaux. Conductor Seokwon Hong skilfully guided his orchestra in the already recognisable language of Messiaen: luminous blocks of sound, gleaming brass chorales, the shimmer of high woodwinds, strings used as glowing halos rather than agitated protagonists.

Finally, the Busan Philharmonic got to show off all its facets in Sibelius' Symphony no. 7 in C major. Although only about 20 minutes long, it is a distillation of the sprawling landscapes of his earlier works into a single, seamless movement, with its triple recurring theme in the trombones like solemn invocations, each time in unhurried, inevitable grandeur. It is this very grandeur that has has the orchestra lose its sharp focus and, like weather surging and receding across a vast Nordic sky, only allow patches of uncanny transparency, string tremolos, and woodwind arabesques.”