KB News Desk
The pianist’s new ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ recording carries forward lessons from his late teacher — and his own journey back to the keyboard
About a year after pianist and educator Russell Sherman died, his widow and fellow pianist Byun Wha Kyung handed one of their students Sohn Minsoo a score Sherman had studied for years: Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”
“Take it home and have a look,” she said, according to Sohn, 50, who is now on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where Sherman and Byun taught for decades.
The score was dense with Sherman’s markings. There were “so many moments that moved me deeply” as he worked through it, Sohn said at a press conference in Seoul on Thursday.
Some of the notes were not musical at all. Beside the C minor prelude, Sherman had written a short poem, drawing on the story of Caesar and Brutus.
“I thought, so this is what he imagined in this piece,” Sohn said. “I could feel a world much wider than the one I had in mind.”
The score also carried a private joke. During Sohn’s student years, Sherman would grumble, half in jest, that he needed to record and perform the work someday but had no time “because I’m teaching all of you.”
That score sits behind “The Well-Tempered Clavier I,” Sohn’s first album in six years, released Oct. 2 on Hyperion and dedicated to Sherman and Byun.
The album is his debut on the British label and the first in “a series of recordings of pillars of the piano repertoire,” Dominic Fyfe, A&R director of Hyperion Records and Decca Classics, said in a statement.
Bach was not a natural fit at first. As a young student who simply loved playing the piano, Sohn said, he gravitated to music full of drama and kept his distance from Bach and Beethoven, composers whose meaning reveals itself only to those who dig deep and keep returning.
Sherman and Byun would not let him. Exam programs and graduation recitals always included one or the other, as though, Sohn said, they believed he had a mission to fulfill.
“At some point I looked back and realized these were the things my teachers wanted to pass on to me,” he said. “As a musician, and as a member of society, the composers I felt I had to bring out into the world and talk about with more people were Beethoven and Bach.”
Sohn first recorded Bach some 15 years ago with the “Goldberg Variations,” a work he described as entirely different from “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” The “Goldberg,” he said, grows systematically from a single theme until the aria returns at the end, with an irresistible pull on the listener. “The Well-Tempered Clavier” instead holds “infinite variety,” he said, and nearly every complex question, emotion and feeling a person might meet in a lifetime, spread across its 24 preludes and fugues.
The Bach project also grew out of a long stretch Sohn rarely discusses in public. On Dec. 31, 2008, an accident left him unable to use his right hand for about three years, he said. Determined to do more with his left, he overworked it until it, too, needed surgery.
“Back then, every day was survival mode,” he said. “I kept asking myself, if I can’t perform, what meaning can I find in this room?”
When he asked what he must do as a musician with one life to live, he said, the first answers that came to him were Beethoven’s sonatas and Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.”
“Playing the Beethoven sonatas was like finding the hands I had lost,” he said.
Even while recording that cycle, he said, his hands hurt so much that he barely got through it. Inspired in part by Tiger Woods’ detailed account of rebuilding his golf swing, he spent years rethinking how to use his body at the keyboard. The struggle lasted from 2008 until around the COVID-19 pandemic, and he is now free of the pain, he said.
He said he had long hesitated to speak about it. “What I went through is nothing compared to what people can experience in life,” he said.
Sohn is also known as the teacher of Lim Yunchan, whose own recording of the “Goldberg Variations” drew wide attention earlier this year. Asked whether he had recommended the work, Sohn said it was the other way around.
In one of their first lessons, he said, he assigned Lim several preludes and fugues from “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” It was Lim who wanted to play the “Goldberg” and who came to a lesson having already learned about 10 of the variations. Sohn said he was surprised, but suggested Lim first explore other Bach works and return to the piece later.
“It was Yunchan who decided when that would be,” Sohn said. “That piece seems to have had a very special meaning for him, too.”
Now a teacher at the same school where Sherman and Byun taught, Sohn said he mostly tries to pass on what he learned from them, and that teaching begins with looking back at oneself.
“Rather than thinking I have all the answers, I try to listen closely to what the other person is saying and asking, and to keep following the questions that come out of it together,” he said. “In a way, it’s an extension of my own practice. I end up learning more.”
Sohn launched a world tour for the album last month in Victoria and Vancouver, Canada. Some 20 concerts will follow, including at the Seoul Arts Center’s Concert Hall on Oct. 27, and in Taiwan, Singapore and at Carnegie Hall in New York.
