The South Korean pianist Yeseul Moon (*1992) released a CD on MDG on 10.02.2023 in which she recorded works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Gilead Mishory and Christopher Tarnow. In particular, she interprets Hartmann’s three-movement Piano Sonata “27 April 1945” as well as an early version of the Scherzo from the Piano Sonata “27 April 1945”.
Congratulations to Yeseul Moon for this fantastic recording!
For more information and to purchase the CD, please visit:
https://www.mdg.de/moon-ghetto-lullaby
Excerpt of reviews:
Klaus Friedrich (in CLASS: aktuell-Magazin 2023/Nr. 1, p. 6): The crime of the Holocaust and the world war remains inconceivable. In a poignant new recording, Yeseul Moon explores three very different artistic approaches to horror. The piano works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Gilead Mishory and Christopher Tarnow get right under your skin, even without a pointed finger.
Hartmann himself was an eyewitness: the harrowing sight of a trek of survivors from the Dachau concentration camp was the occasion for the composition of the piano sonata “27 April 1945”, which takes up what he saw with indescribable intensity and can be heard here in the revised version. In the touching “Funeral March” he quotes the workers’ song “Brothers, to the Sun, to Freedom”.
Gilead Mishory’s “Escape Pieces” interpret the award-winning novel of the same name by Anne Michaels. The story of the boy Jakob Beer, who loses his entire family in the Holocaust, is interlaced many times in place and time. Mishory takes up these complex images with the help of associative motifs and quotations – a grandiose interpretation of the poetic template!
Christopher Tarnow also takes his cue from a literary model: Hermann Hesse’s texts express an extreme sadness, which Tarnow translates musically in very different ways – as a simple melody or as a “sunken” song. Yeseul Moon audibly takes personal consternation to heart with grandiose expressiveness.
With the Scherzo from the early version of Hartmann’s Sonata, which quotes the “Internationale”, she succeeds in a brilliant conclusion to this programme, which is as fascinating as it is very intense to listen to.
More reviews of the CD:
https://klassik-festival.de/musikalische-trauerarbeit (Martin Demmler)
http://www.opushd.net/article?article=3264 (french: Jean-Jacques Millo and translated into english by Lawrence Schulman)
http://www.klassik-heute.de/4daction/www_medien_einzeln?id=24305&CDS30 (Martin Blaumeiser)