Jaap van Zweden and the Seoul Philharmonic prepare for their US tour

At Seoul Arts Center, Jaap van Zweden and the Seoul Philharmonic offered a focused preview of their forthcoming US-tour programme: Donghoon Shin’s Upon His Ghostly Solitude, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor with Bomsori Kim and, after the interval, Rachmaninov’s Symphony no. 2 in E minor. 

Shin’s Upon His Ghostly Solitude, sparked by Yeats’s 1919, tracks war’s nightmare cycles in four linked panels – Prelude, Round Dance, Interlude, March. Whispered harmonics drift like revenants while percussive flashes cut across the frame; fragments hover between collision and stasis. Van Zweden kept a steady hand on the score’s germinal chord and its mutations, so the collage read as argument rather than mosaic. The orchestra, alert to micro-contrasts of colour, maintained razor detail inside dense textures.

In the Mendelssohn, Bomsori chose grain over gloss. This was not a polished oil painting but an intentional etching: attacks were keen, articulation candid to the point of austerity. The effect generated instinctive tension and a living, tensile line that seized the hall at once. In the first movement, fleeting smudges of intonation surfaced in the quickest passagework and a narrow, uniform vibrato sometimes constrained the expressive spectrum. Yet Bomsori offset those limits by shaving and easing the tempo at critical joints, keeping the musical logic taut; the straight, sometimes rough sonority became an interpretative stance rather than a liability, the means by which rhetoric stayed honest.

The Andante proved the surest ground. Song unfolded naturally, long‑breathed and centred, the cantilena anchored by discreet portamenti that never drooped. In the finale, she refused the easy glitter of a sparkling finish. Instead, she engraved the sforzando contrasts like bold contour lines, letting transparent pianissimi cross with unforced fortes so that liveliness and inwardness took turns at the surface. At times the aesthetic carried a seasoned freedom; taken whole, though, it read as an attempt to rephrase Mendelssohn in contemporary grammar.

After the break came Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, music that can slump under its own velvet. Van Zweden’s tempo map was assertive: movements 1, 2 and 4 sat at the brisk edge of their markings, with only the Adagio allowed to broaden. The motto arrived not as Russian gloom but as a blade-sharp focal point with instant voltage. Where sentiment might pool, the conductor put legibility first. The slow introduction was kept taut; the Allegro moderato’s first subject refused indulgence; the second unrolled on a long arc. More telling still was his recalibration of dynamic ground: the baseline shifted from pp–ff towards mf–fff, a deliberate reweighting of the symphony’s emotional topography that favoured through-line over languor.

The Scherzo bit hard at Allegro molto without disarray, its trio fugato cleanly parsed; in the Andante, the Principal Clarinet projected a cool, vibrato-light tone and the strings kept breadth through restrained portamento. The finale flirted with risk by design: tarantella rhythms held their clarity at pace and the coda’s surge felt less like intoxication than architectural necessity. Some fff plateaus compressed micro-gradations and, at times, damped the woodwinds’ filigree, but the core achievements – clarity, rhythmic spine, sustained long breath – remained emphatic.

What the Seoul Philharmonic advanced, consistently, was a modern romanticism: clean attack, audible inner parts, climaxes earned by line rather than sheer shove. Whether American audiences embrace this tempered steel of lyricism is an open question; the message of the tour, however, is already legible. Form, unaided by sentimental crutches, can carry the weight.