At Seoul Arts Center, Jaap van Zweden and the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra opened with Younghi Pagh-Paan’s breath-long Frau, warum weinst du? Wen suchst du?: veiled strings and shadowed brass asked a question that evaporated before memory could seize it.
From the very first bars of Britten’s Violin Concerto, Augustin Hadelich seemed to lift the Winged Victory of Samothrace from its marble prow and let it breathe. His 1744 Guarneri sent a phrase rising off the G string that clung to silence the way the goddess’ wind-soaked chiton clings to her torso, every filament of damp cloth rendered in stone yet alive with motion. The line felt chiselled rather than bowed: music sculpted in mid-air, its grain disclosed rather than merely sung.
That sculptural exactitude never hardened into coldness. Within each perfectly bevelled contour Hadelich released a microscopic wash of colour – here a sun-fleck catching on marble, there a sudden bruise of shadow in a recess – so that the statue seemed to rotate imperceptibly under changing light. In the Vivace Scherzo, he skated octave runs with the centrifugal daring of Nike’s wings slicing sea spray, ricochet bowings flicked like droplets from a blade; mordant accents winked, instantly gone, like brief glints off wet stone. Van Zweden matched the play of sheen and depth, paring orchestral mass in half-tones so that timpani taps and bassoon croaks registered as sotto voce commentary drifting across the Aegean.
The long cadenza became an interior promenade around the statue’s torso. Motifs surfaced, blinked, submerged; left-hand pizzicati whispered like side thoughts; harmonics flashed like distant lanterns catching on polished marble. When the Passacaglia finally anchored itself, Hadelich’s sound thinned to a hair-breadth of silver over a dark pedal zone, hanging as though fearful of touching land. His last note exhaled, not flourished, and the audience’s delayed inhale – an audible restoration of breath – remained the surest measure of his persuasion.
Brahms’ Fourth Symphony stood as the evening’s granite pillar, though initially one sculpted in low relief. Van Zweden launched the first movement at a supple Andante allegro whose mid-tempo made space for internal embroidery: flutes breathed through the string canopy, bassoons filed the dovetail joints, and the violins’ descending thirds were voiced less as grief than as private remembrance. The conductor’s obsession with clarity produced a surface like polished walnut; yet underneath, currents pressed. In the Andante moderato the horns unrolled their chorale on feather-down dynamics, clarinet and oboe wove a lattice of autumnal light, and the cellos answered with slow-pulse sighs. It was an engraving, not a painting – lines sunk into the grain, resonance carefully rationed, the melancholy held within well-planed borders.
Enter the Allegro giocoso and the carving knife was replaced by a mallet. Dynamics leapt two notches, tempi tightened, and what had been intaglio became bold repoussé: triangle sparks flew, brass stabs stood forward, the tutti rode the crest of its own volume. Excitement was real, yet the Trio’s rustic lilt pancaked under sheer weight; violas and bassoons, whose off-beat chuckle is the movement’s safety-valve, were ironed flat.
The finale’s Passacaglia pushed the imbalance further. Van Zweden’s focus on massed tone doubly embossed the trombone chorales, while subsidiary flute and oboe variations fought like seedlings under paving slabs. Brahms, master joiner, designed three and four to slot flush against the tapered tenons of one and two; here the pieces refused to mate, a hairline of daylight glinting between them. The effect was not collapse but misalignment: the narrative reached its apotheosis early, leaving the closing hammer-strokes impressive in force yet oddly like a postscript. One suspects future seasons will plane these surfaces and close the joint, for the raw timber is noble and the craftsmanship, in outline, sound.
