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A babe musician who even gets Ms. CfL's stamp of approval

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on December 6, 2023 at 14:37:30

That would be babe Korean double bass player Mikyung Sung who has released a double album which includes a couple of unlikely transcriptions for that instrument: the Franck Sonata and the Mendelssohn Cello Sonata No. 2. I became alerted to this new album a couple of days ago through Jed Distler's rave review in Classics Today.

Whenever I hear double bass solos, I'm uncomfortably aware of how hard it is for the players on that instrument to hit the pitch dead center throughout a performance. The problem is that there's just so much darn real estate to cover on the fingerboard that the room for error expands inordinately. The potential for trouble increases even more when you're scurrying up and down in a work like the Mendelssohn Sonata on this album, but Ms. Sung remains miraculously unscathed throughout. Not to mention the piano part, which is often written in Mendelssohn's "fairy" style: lots of notes going up and down the keyboard at a mile a minute - and Sung's pianist on this recording, Jaemin Shin, proves himself an outstanding pianistic sprinter.

Although I've never played the piece (outside of sight-reading it alone just for fun), one of the earliest recordings I owned was of the Mercury Starker/Sebok LP which included it - a truly remarkable performance in itself which I still treasure to this day. Ms. CfL once gave a performance of it with Peter Shelton, the assistant principal cellist of the SF Symphony before his untimely early death in 2009. (We were all students at the time of that Mendelssohn performance.) So she certainly knows the work, and was definitely impressed by what she heard from Sung and Shin.

Certainly this is unlikely repertoire to be heard on the double bass, but very worthwhile!

Edits: 12/06/23

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