Mergina su Perlo Auskaru

New York City can be like a jungle. With a menagerie of people intermingling in seemingly never ceasing action, the City has ecosystems within ecosystems. Vibraphonist/composer Yuhan Su has been inspired by her chaotic new home and her experiences with the individuals she has met there. Her new recording, City Animals, captures her enthusiasm for the craziness of the City and the adventures she has had since her arrival. Originally from Taiwan, Su came to the States in 2008 to further her music studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she expanded her classical percussion knowledge to the world of jazz and improvisation. In 2012, Su moved to New York; she fell in love with the City and immediately immersed herself in the wilds of the jazz scene.

The Korean pianist Su Yeon Kim achieved international acclaim when she won the first prize at the Concours musical international de Montréal 2021 and the second prize at the International Mozart Competition 2020 in Salzburg. For her debut album on the Steinway & Sons label Su Yeon Kim displays her passion and gift for performing the music of Mozart with some of his most beloved piano works as well as a few rarities.

This album contains a collection of works from the Seicento, most of them well known and recorded several times, although it also includes a composition (Cazzati’s La Verità sprezzata) that is little or not very often heard. It is a repertoire to which we have usually devoted ourselves. That is why we wanted to propose our own way of doing it, in all honesty and avoiding fashions and artifice, without pretentiousness, respecting only the rhetorical —and dramatic— discourse implicit in the texts and their setting to music, fleeing from affectation —but not from affetti— and unquestioned customs, taking advantage of the information provided by musicological research, making use of our intuition and experience, and also remembering the teaching we have received from our old masters. Inspired by Ripa’s allegory and by the idea of truth as άλήθεια or unveiling of the self that is hidden by the veil of appearance, we have endowed our performance with a certain natural simplicity, a deliberate nakedness, especially in moments of particular emotional intensity.