Seong-Jin Cho: The Handel Project review — a young Korean with a master touch

Seong-Jin Cho

The Handel Project

★★★★★

It isn’t enough these days for technically awesome young pianists from the Far East to win top competitions and recording contracts and look good in designer jackets. They need distinctive repertoire too. With Seong-Jin Cho, winner of the 2015 International Chopin Competition, the recent solution has been The Handel Project, mixing Handel’s crisply worked keyboard suites with echoes and ruminations from later centuries.

One manifestation was his Barbican recital in London last week. But this album is the mother lode. You get three Handel suites plus encore slivers, with Brahms’s tumultuous Handel variations of 1861 perched on top like a grandiose castle crowning a hill.

Listening to his brittle handling of the opening Adagio of Suite No 2, I initially thought he was channelling Glenn Gould, famous in his own day for harpsichord pieces played on a modern piano. But I soon realised he was only channelling Seong-Jin Cho, an absolute master of clarifying textures with multiple shades of colour and touch; an expert juggler too, able to respect baroque sprightliness while also using a modern piano’s resources to warm and expand the music’s aura.

This definitely includes exploiting the bass notes: key contributors especially in Brahms’s fleet and dazzling set of 25 variations, capped by a mighty fugue of symphonic force. After all that we get two Handel encores, a sarabande and minuet, the last one gorgeously melting and tender. It’s this impressive album’s farewell kiss.