Isang Yun: Silla, Violin Concerto III – Park, Vänskä

Prison cell in Seoul, 1967. A man tries to end his own life rather than face what South Korea’s intelligence services have planned for him. Igor Stravinsky signs a petition. So does Herbert von Karajan, so does Hans Werner Henze — an unlikely trio united in outrage over the fate of a composer most Americans have still never heard of. Isang Yun survived that ordeal, barely, and went back to writing music that sounds nothing like suffering and everything like a man who found, eventually, some kind of peace with it.

That peace is what this new BIS disc captures, or tries to. Vänskä and the Seoul Philharmonic give us three works from Yun’s late maturity — well, late-ish; he had eight more years to live after finishing the Violin Concerto III in 1992 — and the results are absorbing without ever quite catching fire in the way I suspect the composer intended.

Start with Silla. The title refers to an ancient Korean kingdom, and Yun’s “Legend for Orchestra” (his own subtitle, and I’ll honor it here since it functions almost as a genre marker rather than a proper name in the usual sense) unfolds like a fresco seen through fog. Long melodic lines emerge from the string section and dissolve before they resolve. This is Yun’s mature language, descended from what he called Hauptton artistry, single tones ornamented and inflected the way a Korean court artist might bend a note on the piri. Vänskä, not a director I’d have guessed for this repertoire, proves remarkably sympathetic. He lets the sonorities breathe. Brass entries have weight without barking. The strings produce a burnished, almost vibrato-less sheen in the work’s central span that had me thinking, oddly, of Sibelius’s Tapiola — another piece about landscape as much as narrative.

The Violin Concerto III is the disc’s real discovery, or would be if more listeners knew Yun’s other concertos to compare it against. Sueye Park, still in her twenties, plays with an unforced sweetness that never curdles into blandness, no small feat in music this astringent. The concerto asks for constant microtonal inflection, glissandi that aren’t showy but structural, integral to the melodic argument rather than decoration slapped on top. Park handles all this with a kind of vocal naturalness; you forget, for stretches, that you’re listening to twelve-tone-derived pitch organization at all. The slow central music, in particular, achieves an eloquence that reminded me why some German critics in the 1980s were calling Yun the most important East Asian composer working in the Western tradition. A claim that sounds provincial now but wasn’t crazy then.

Chamber Symphony I is the earliest piece here, dating from 1987, scored for a chamber-sized band: paired oboes, paired horns, strings. One movement, three internal sections, wind choirs trading allegiances like diplomats at a shifting conference table. It’s the most obviously “Darmstadt” piece on the program. You can hear traces of Yun’s engagement with Boulez-era serialism even as he pulls away from it, softening hard edges into something closer to calligraphy. The playing here is distinguished — those horns blend gorgeously, never covering the oboes’ reedy astringency — though I found myself wishing for a slightly more dangerous edge, the kind of raw immediacy Kent Nagano brought to Yun’s orchestral music decades back with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

That’s my only real reservation, and it applies to the whole disc. Everything here is beautifully prepared, gorgeously recorded — BIS’s engineers at Lotte Concert Hall have given us a sound of tremendous clarity and warmth, the SACD layer especially rich in the bass — but there’s a slight sense of caution, of an orchestra still finding its comfort level with Yun’s idiom rather than owning it outright. Compare this with the old CPO recordings, some featuring the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester under David Robertson, or the Argo Yun cycle from the 1990s, and you sense a more idiomatic, riskier engagement: players who’d absorbed the language rather than translated it.

Still. This is valuable, sensitively played, gorgeously recorded, and Yun’s music, whatever caveats one might raise about this particular rendition, deserves every hearing it can get. His life story tends to overshadow the work itself, understandably. But the work stands on its own, mysterious and exquisite, and worth the world’s belated attention. Recommended, with only mild reservations.