Soloist, composer and conductor take their bow at the Barbican, 20 November 2025. Photo (c) Mark Allan 2025
Seong-Jin Cho, piano; London Symphony Orchestra / Maxime Pascal
Barbican Concert Hall, London, 20 November 2025
Donghoon Shin’s new Piano Concerto (2024-25) is a very different proposition from his Cello Concerto, premiered three years ago. Most prominently, it is one of a number of works that re-engage with music of the past, in this case that of Schumann – one of Shin’s favourite composers for the piano – specifically the dual personalities, “Florestan the wild” (as Schumann once wrote to Clara) and “Eusebius the mild” of his artistic make-up. Shin feels this duality in his own creative persona as well as that of his new-found friend, Seong-Jin Cho, who gave a barnstorming first performance of the 35-minute-long concerto.
Played continuously, Shin’s three-movement concerto is an eruptive, at times violent score – representing the Florestanian aspect – yet opens in a passage of utmost delicacy (the Eusebian), so exposing Cho’s somewhat delayed and subdued first entry. Once Cho summoned up the wild spirit, however, the main thrust of the opening sonata-form span burst forward, the dual aspects playing tag until Florestan captured the cadenza. The furious virtuosity of this brought to mind Prokofiev – in the colossale mode of his Second Concerto – and Rachmaninov, rather than Schumann. Shin’s harmonic context moves fluently between the 19th and 20th centuries, while sounding undeniably like a work conceived in 2025.
The ensuing funeral march of the central movement explores the double-nature of the work from a different perspective, Eusebius giving way to Florestan before being restored, as if in some graphic nightmare. The enforced jollity of the final “twisted rondo” makes for a surreal contrast, especially with the incursion of castanets midway through and even a brief flirtation with Gershwin. The coda brought the house down: rarely does a modern piano concerto premiere result in half-a-dozen curtain calls for composer, conductor and soloist.
The concerto premiere formed part of the K-Music Festival and was rewarded by a well-filled hall. Opening the programme were the premieres of two short orchestral pieces commissioned as part of the LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme. Omri Kochavi’s gilufim (Hebrew for “carving”) was initiated in a workshop in 2023 but largely modelled in 2024-25. The basic concept was to create “shape and form by carving material away rather than putting it in”. Accordingly, the work starts in haziness with wind chords underpinning a sinuous marimba line which fades in and out of view as this five-minute work proceeds. The transition to the harmonically clearer, more refined, chiselled conclusion is quite well handled, but overall gilufim needs a touch more polishing, not least its somewhat abrupt end.
The LSO conducted by Maxime Pascal acclaim composer Sasha Scott after the premiere of Sly, Photo (c) Mark Allan 2025
Sasha Scott’s Sly (also 2024-25), by contrast, is a more convincingly complete piece, larger in scale and expressive focus. Scott explains that at the start of the composition process she “wanted to set the piece up to feel sly, slightly devious and shifting”, and the work underwent a good deal of shifting in its creation – not least from a three-and-a-half-minute initial version to the final 10-minute fantasia that builds – a little deviously – to its well-achieved conclusion. There is a degree of slyness about the quiet, full-textured opening that emerges into audibility rather than starting, as if the piece has been underway for some time already. The work has a dreamlike sense of unease about it throughout, turning into nightmare before the moment of waking brings a new feeling of disorientation – a curiously scored passage for chimes, piano and harp – before the emphatic close.
The LSO under Maxime Pascal performed all the works with great aplomb and no little virtuosity and, judging by the visual exchanges between the players, seemed to relish the task. So, too, in the concluding work, Boulez’s Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, 50 years old in this, its composer’s centenary year. Pascal’s rather birdlike, staccato direction from the podium emphasised the work’s ritualistic nature. The LSO player provided some superb playing, not least from principal oboe, Juliana Koch, in the first of the eight instrumental groups.