Sunwook Kim on playing Beethoven with the SCO: 'He's a composer I can't stay away from'

It was actually with Brahms – that composer’s huge First Piano Concerto – that Kim won the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2006, aged just 18, becoming one of the prestigious contest’s youngest and its first Asian winner. But his passion for Beethoven began in earnest soon afterwards, when he applied himself to learning both the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos – which he performs with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in October – as well as giving a complete cycle of the composer’s piano sonatas in Seoul. “That was the most important turning point for me,” he says. “And the concertos began to feel like fragments of something much larger. To understand Beethoven, I believe the piano sonatas are the foundation. Through them, you can trace how his thinking and his musical tastes developed. After playing all 32 sonatas, I came to understand more deeply the experimental spirit in which the Fourth Concerto was written, and the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Fifth.”

We’ll return to that “experimental spirit” later. But stepping back for a moment, 2026-7 going to be a big season for Beethoven: it’s been 200 years since his death in 1827, and orchestras around the world are marking the anniversary – in Scotland, it’s with quite a lot of his music gratifyingly distributed across the major orchestras. What is it about the composer’s works that means they remains relevant to us two centuries after he died? Kim is clear in his theories. “Beethoven’s music still fills us with enormous courage today. Part of that comes from his personal story, a relentlessly hard life, and the pain of his deafness, which were transfigured into art. But the music itself carries the power of overcoming – and that power is precisely why we still need his music.”

It’s a strong argument, and one that’s certainly relevant in our time of apparently ever more worrying threats and challenges. But another big question is surely whether Beethoven even needs this kind of attention: don’t we already know quite a lot of his music inside out? “Familiarity means we might have experienced a piece many times,” Kim admits. “But if we listen with open hearts and open ears, we notice how the colours change with the weather, so to speak, and we can seek out what’s new rather than settling into what’s known. In fact, the better I come to know a piece of music, the more strongly I feel how much I don’t know it.”

Kim’s deep immersion in Beethoven’s music even led him to the composer’s birthplace, now a museum, where he became the inaugural participant in the Beethoven-Haus Bonn’s mentorship programme, back in 2013. What does he remember about getting up close to the composer’s original manuscripts? “Beethoven’s autograph scores and letters are kept behind a cave-like door in the underground of the museum,” he says. “The traces of notes set down in ink on paper, yellowed by time, and the force that radiates from that aura, remind you when you later perform the music that it did not simply come into existence as a matter of course. A human soul is contained in it.”

With that close study of original sources, you might expect Kim to have become a hardcore period-instrument devotee. Not at all: he has a far more balanced and nuanced attitude towards the instruments he uses. “I don’t dislike period-instrument performance at all – I’ve performed Beethoven concerts several times on an old Pleyel piano. But those who insist it’s the one true original can be one-sided, because modern instruments offer a far wider expressive range. I prefer them and play them most of the time.” Another kind of authenticity is more important to him. “A conductor once suggested I play with the techniques and nuances typical of period instruments, and I largely followed his ideas. But I wasn’t personally happy in that performance. It’s not that I dislike the period style – it simply wasn’t me. I want to play the way I hear it and believe it, trusting that it’s right.”

Kim’s relationship with the piano, however, has become complicated by his increasingly regular work as a conductor: he’s guest conducted with the Seoul Philharmonic, Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, among several other ensembles, and he’s Music Director of South Korea’s Gyeonggi Philharmonic. “I dreamed of being a conductor, and I actually studied the piano because I wanted to become one. These days, I’m on stage more often as a conductor, and sometimes I genuinely lose track of whether I’m a pianist or a conductor – a piano score can look like an orchestral score to me, and vice versa. They’re just different means of delivering music.”

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For his performances with the SCO, Kim will be combining both roles, directing both concertos from the keyboard. It’s not easy, he admits, but: “the joy is greater than the difficulty. Communication, which normally runs through the three-way structure of conductor, soloist and orchestra, is simplified to just orchestra and soloist, so a much more direct exchange becomes possible. When I’m at the keyboard with an orchestra, I feel like neither a pianist nor a conductor – I’m simply one musician playing together with the orchestra.”

The pieces Kim will be playing with the SCO – the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos – were not, of course, written to be heard together. But for Kim, they make a logical and illuminating pairing. “They were both written when Beethoven’s imagination was at its most fertile. They tear down boundaries drawn not by him, but by the world around him.”

With No. 5, the “Emperor” Concerto, that pioneering spirit might come from heroism, extroversion, grandeur. But No. 4 is just as revolutionary, albeit in a far quieter way, in allowing its soloist to open proceedings entirely alone. “That isn’t a reworking of the conventional script – it’s turning the script back to front. Imagine how radical that must have felt at the time.”

Radical, certainly, but also profoundly poetic, and deeply personal. And it’ll be fascinating to discover how Kim’s clearly personal sense of connection to this music plays out in his performances.

Sunwook Kim performs Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 8 October; City Halls, Glasgow, 9 October; and Aberdeen Music Hall, 10 October. Scotsman readers can claim a 20 per cent discount off full price tickets when using the promo code ‘TSMSCO20’ . The offer is available via box offices at all the orchestra’s partner venues. This feature was produced in association with the SCO.

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