Dance music is, by nature, music that accompanies dance. Yet sometimes it captivates listeners as a complete art form in its own right, stirring not the body but the soul. The dance pieces performed by pianist Cho Seong-jin, who thoroughly enchanted the audience at Tongyeong International Concert Hall on the evening of the 30th, were precisely such an example.
Having captivated Tongyeong with Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 at the opening performance, Cho presented a recital program devoted entirely to the form of "dance." The program traced the evolution of dance music from the Baroque through Classical, Romantic, and modern eras — a recital he has been performing since early this year in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
The first piece was Bach's Partita. In this work that captures the essence of Baroque-era dance music, Cho crafted the music with a clear, transparent tone and a light, precise touch. During the Minuet, he gently swayed his head while riding the flow, displaying remarkable concentration in his delicate rendering of even the smallest notes. He brought out the character of each dance movement through restrained expression while breathing his own vitality into the tidy structure.
The following piece, Schoenberg's "Suite for Piano," unveiled an entirely different world. Written in an atonal language, this work retains only faint traces of the dance-suite form while revealing a bizarre, grotesque sensibility. Cho highlighted the rhythms with sharp, dry keystrokes, capturing fleeting moments that appeared and vanished as if a mischievous specter were passing through. He rendered this music — abstract yet possessed of a powerful rhythmic drive — in three dimensions, ratcheting up the program's tension.
