In 2017 the Berlin Philharmonic released its John Adams Edition, taken from concerts by the orchestra. Now it has done the same with its archive of performances of Unsuk Chin’s beguilingly coloured music, recorded between 2005 and 2022. It’s a collection of six works, handsomely presented and scrupulously documented, and including a Blu-Ray Disc with videos of all but one of the performances, as well as an interview with the composer.
Three of the pieces included are concertos. The earliest is the work for piano from 1995, in which the influence of the Études by Chin’s teacher György Ligeti is very obvious in the virtuoso keyboard writing, dispatched with great brilliance in this performance by Sunwook Kim.
Played here by Christian Tetzlaff, the First Violin Concerto (2001) established Chin’s reputation internationally, and won the Grawemeyer award. Its form is relatively conventional, but like so much of her music, the range of colour and textures is ravishing, providing an ever-shifting web of sound over which the violin soars and cascades. Best of the three, and arguably Chin’s finest work to date, is her cello concerto, played as it was at its world premiere at the Proms in London in 2009 by Alban Gerhardt, and teasingly confounding expectations at every turn.
Another of the works here, the 2014 Silence des Sirènes, is a concerto for soprano in all but name; the voice is effectively treated instrumentally, with only a few morsels of the text (from Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses) clearly decipherable. It was written for Barbara Hannigan, who is given the opportunity to unveil her full array of vocal techniques.
Perhaps the two purely orchestral pieces here, Rocaná from 2006 and Chorós Chordón of 2017, are less convincing. As always with Chin, however, every detail is precisely imagined, and the set as a whole provides a perfect introduction to her magical sound world that is wonderfully realised by the orchestra.
Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify
