Jung

Jung Jaeil, the multi-award-winning South Korean composer behind the Parasite and Squid Game soundtracks, has signed to Decca Records. Now, the first project in this new partnership is being offered, the international release of Jung Jaeil’s choral-electronic album psalms.

Jung Jae Il’s intensely personal new album translates his love of biblical psalm into music, acting as a spiritual salve for our turbulent times. Revisiting the rich string textures of his acclaimed Parasite and Squid Game soundtracks, the composer adds massed choir, a cappella vocal effects, and solo vocals, plus judiciously employed electronics. Overtones of Bach and Handel resonate through “memorare,” named after a prayer to the Virgin Mary. In dynamic contrast, the staccato synth-percussive effects heard in “his days are like a passing shadow II” strike a more experimental note. Throughout, Jung Jae Il conjures a compelling sense of mood, alternately despairing, hopeful, and apprehensive.

Klare Diktion und sensibles Textverständnis sind die herausragenden Qualitäten des Baritons Christopher Jung, heißt es in einer Rezension des Online-Magazins "Klassik heute" zu seiner bemerkenswerten ersten Liederaufnahme, die vor drei Jahren auf einem Album des Rostocker Labels PASCHENrecords erschien.

Composer Christian FP Kram devotes himself to an almost forgotten genre. He writes piano lieder – intimate, lyrical, pointed miniatures of text and music.

The album contains popular works of piano literature, which combines the theme of distant reminiscences of lost happiness-expressed directly in the titles of the works or veiled, as in Schubert's Sonata in a major written a few months before his death. It is a tribute to Beethoven's style, but also a typical conglomeration of intimate emotions expressed in lyrical motifs, where brilliant piano playing is in the background, although undeniably present. Janáček's cycles were created in the darkest period of his life.