Pianist Hai-Kyung Suh to Mark Six Decades in Music at Carnegie Hall
The Korean pianist will perform Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini in Seoul before her Zankel Auditorium recital.
Korean pianist Hai-Kyung Suh will mark six decades in music this coming season with two events bringing together her two musical worlds. In the West, she will give a special recital in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Auditorium on 3rd October; just before that in Korea, on 19th September, she will perform Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra under Music Director Jaap van Zweden, in a large-scale outdoor concert.
It was in Europe that Hai-Kyung Suh first came to international recognition — defying both her father's warning that women could not make a profession, and the many naysayers who advised that Korean pianists were not respected in the West. She was the first Asian artist to win the top prize awarded at the Ferruccio Busoni Piano Competition, held in Bolzano, Italy; after which she was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit from the Korean government, its youngest-ever recipient. She quickly followed the Busoni success with a top prize in the ARD Piano Competition in Munich, Germany (as well as other important awards). Since then, there have been a procession of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Decca — great Europe-based labels, both — and success on four continents.
Since then, she has collaborated with many of the finest conductors of our time, among them Riccardo Muti, Ivan Fischer, Myung-Whun Chung, Franz Welser-Möst, Charles Dutoit, Zdeněk Mácal, Gianluigi Gelmetti and Long Yu. Orchestras with which she has appeared as soloist include the London Philharmonic, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, HR Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Nagoya Philharmonic, Osaka Philharmonic, Shanghai Philharmonic, Moscow Philharmonic and Moscow State Symphony.
As if her journey had not been dramatic enough, had not taken determination enough, an earthquake — in 2006, at the peak of her international career, she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. It seemed as though the treatments would cost her the use of one hand. But the doctors did not take into account Hai-Kyung Suh's remarkable willpower. After five months and dozens of intensive chemo and radiotherapy sessions, she returned to the stage in 2008 to play a hugely challenging program of both Rachmaninoff's Piano Concertos nos. 2 and 3, at Seoul Arts Centre. The event made newspaper front pages, and many of the 2,500 people present were moved to tears. She resumed her career and continues to play at the highest level, across Europe, North America and East Asia.
Hai-Kyung Suh's discography is distinguished, and growing. In 2016 she recorded four Mozart piano concertos with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields for Deutsche Grammophon. Also for DG, she recorded the four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini ('powerfully reached performance, deep and dark, soulful and confiding...pulls the music off the page with devotion as well as volatility' Classical Source) and the four Tchaikovsky concertos (2012), both sets with Aleksander Dmitriyev conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. She is the first woman to present all works for piano and orchestra of both composers.
Also in her DG catalogue; an album of Beethoven sonatas, a recording of virtuoso solo music by Mussorgsky, Scriabin, and Stravinsky, and 'Sound Paintings' — music by Lowell Liebermann, Debussy and Mussorgsky. For Decca, meanwhile, she has also made many recordings to date, traversing solo piano works by Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and others. Her most recent Decca album, in 2024, was 'The Fantasy of Schubert.'
As she looks back across six decades in music, Hai-Kyung Suh might allow herself a moment or two of pride, for what she has achieved. For the glass barriers smashed, the walls broken down, for her fellow Korean pianists, perhaps the female ones especially. But looking back is not her style. She has too much work to do, determined — that willpower again — to achieve ever-more musical insight, to constantly improve her formidable technique. She has spoken about wanting to emulate her idol, Arthur Rubinstein. 'Nearly 90 and blind, he still played with mastery,' she says, 'As long as my health allows, I will strive to do the same.'
With designs to head into the recording studio around her upcoming Carnegie Hall recital, with the same program, as well as the collaboration with long-time colleague Jaap van Zweden and a renewed focus on projects in Europe, there is little doubt that she means exactly what she says.
