Winning a famous competition is no guarantee for a successful career. It's certainly helping advance one, but it can also place every public apparition of a young interpreter under a terrible burden of expectations. Seong-Jin Cho, the most recent first prize winner (2015) of the fabled Fryderyk Chopin competition in Warsaw, seemed unfazed by any pressure in his Carnegie Hall recital. He almost totally avoided the music of Chopin in this particular program, bookending several short pieces by Debussy with two substantial, well-known masterpieces. The qualities that make him a great Chopin interpreter – the mixture of virtuosic and poetic dispositions, of fierce and restraint temperaments – were constantly present during the evening, including the two encores: Chopin’s spirited and graceful Prelude in A flat Major Op.28 and Liszt’s adrenaline levels rising Transcendental Etude no. 10.
Debussy’s unique landscapes were as extraordinary rendered as on any other occasion. Cho left South Korea in 2012 to pursue his education at the Paris Conservatoire – where the composer himself studied for more than a decade – and he seems to have a special affinity for the Frenchman’s music. His innate sense for musical ebb and flow, his ability to hide a steely virtuosity under silky, sensuous caresses were particularly relevant in the works he selected. His Reflets dans l’eau had a jazzy quality. Successive steps on the snow (De pas sur la neige) seemed to be part of a dialogue. A sense of perpetuum mobile linked Mouvement, the last piece of the first book of Images, with Le vent dans la plaine, the opening Prelude. In La Fille aux cheveux de lin, every sound was perfectly calibrated. The pianist succeeded in drawing lines with outmost clarity yet giving an overall impression of mists floating from the stage to the listeners below.
Despite his technically impeccable interpretation of this most demanding of all Schubert's piano works, the Korean musician was less successful in bringing forward the specific character of the Fantasy in C Major. Schubert was only 25 when he composed this “symphony” for piano, a major attempt to evade from Beethoven's shadow. (He was only 19 when he penned Der Wanderer, the Lied whose melody is the backbone of the later opus). At the same age, Cho doesn't seem to have the maturity and the life experience to convey the loneliness, the melancholy ingrained in this music and exquisitely expressed in the Lied’s original lyrics. There was barely an echo of the song’s wonderful final verse – “Dort wo du nicht bist, is das Glück”/ “There were you are not, there is your happiness” – in a rendition that was rounded, cultivated, but too detached.