‘Concerts at the Kimbell:’ Cliburn gold medalist Yekwon Sunwoo
—Wayne Lee Gay
Korean pianist Yekwon Sunwoo, gold medalist of the 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, returned to Fort Worth Thursday—and to the Cliburn organization—for a compact recital featuring three romantic-era composers.
The Cliburn Foundation's "Cliburn at the Kimbell" series features significant artists performing about one hour of music presented without intermission. It’s a format echoing (consciously or not) the shorter concerts advocated by B.F. Skinner for the ideal community he proposed in his utopian novel Walden Two of 1948.
In this case, the concept worked beautifully, presenting new insight into three well-known composers. While not a household name, the three orchestral tone poems of Italian Ottorino Respighi's "Roman" trilogy are standard audience favorites (and box office draws) for symphony orchestras. Respighi's less well-known Six Pieces for Piano (composed 1903-06) are not, despite their initial publication as a set, unified in style or concept.
But Sunwoo made the most of these pianistic tidbits. The opening work in the set, Valse coressante, is indeed nothing more or less than a sentimental, generally pretty salon piece. And Sunwoo here beautifully showed off Respighi’s ability to create a beautiful tone and balanced multi-layered textures. The subsequent Canone plays with the basic concept of a two-voiced imitative canon (think "Row, Row, Row your boat") submerged in a florid romantic blanket—a neat compositional trick which, once again, Sunwoo exploited to advantage.
Sunwoo continued to give Respighi the full treatment, mastering the undulating murmur of the Notturno (a standard favorite of amateurs and students), then moving on to the crisply neo-baroque Minuetto. The busy Studio (basically a brief virtuoso etude) followed; and the final Inermezzo-Serenato, actually a transcription of an aria from one of Respighi's seldom-performed operas, neatly displayed Sunwoo's ability to make the piano sing and soar.
Rachmaninoff's six-part cycle Moments musicaux presents special challenges for the pianist, once again met magnificently by Sunwoo. A prime example of early Rachmninoff (before he launched into the monumental and beloved masterpieces of his middle period), the Moments musicaux can appear initially to be six distinctive pieces, each limited in development and each containing narrow thematic material. Sunwoo, however, revealed a superbly momentous cycle. The transition from the almost morbid third movement to the stormy fourth landed squarely on the hard-won serenity of the subsequent Adagio, before bursting into the triumph of the final Maestoso.
After a pause of only a few seconds, Sunwoo tackled Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, the familiarity of which relegated it to the status of a warhorse in the twentieth century. Sunwoo freshened this virtuoso showpiece with flawless execution of the technical challenges and superb empathy for the lyrical passages, including some striking articulations and sonorities. An enthusiastic audience demanded an encore, presented by Sunwoo in the form of the pianistic fireworks of Liszt's Concert Paraphrase of Verdi's Rigoletto.
WHEN: October 8, 2026
WHERE: Kimbell Art Museum, Renzo Piano Pavilion, Fort Worth
WEB: cliburn.org
