Yekwon Sunwoo - Liszt (2026) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

For most of his 20s, pianist Sunwoo Yekwon did not play the works of Franz Liszt. He had only played the composer’s pieces — notorious for their complexity — as a middle school student in the way that precocious players often do, forcing themselves to practice “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” (1851) or “Dante Sonata” (1856) to prove that they can overcome the difficulty. But somewhere along the way to Juilliard, the Mannes School of Music and Berlin, Sunwoo stopped playing Liszt. The decision wasn’t purposeful; instead, it simply reflected his lack of interest in the composer.

“I didn’t even think about playing Liszt until recently,” he said at a press conference in Yeouido, western Seoul, on Thursday.

Through the album, Sunwoo covertly explores the reason behind his newfound interest in Liszt. What had changed was his own interpretation of Liszt’s sound — and how this shift affected the meaning that the composer’s music holds for him.

“The weight of the sound is a little lighter, a little more floaty,” he said, reaching for visual imagery as he described how he approached Liszt’s works. “Like soap bubbles or a clean, transparent piece of glass. A very fine wineglass.”

The album — recorded at the Jesus Christ Church in Berlin’s Dahlem district, where Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan made many of his late recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic — is structured around the idea of “singing on the piano,” according to Sunwoo.

Liszt’s transcriptions of Franz Schubert’s lieder, or music set to poetry, sit alongside opera paraphrases and Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1” (1859), with “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” as what Sunwoo calls a grand finale. The pianist’s recitals pair the Liszt piece with Schubert’s 1828 sonata No. 20 in A major — a coupling that, on the surface, looks like contrast, but that Sunwoo insists is a kinship. Schubert is the creator of the “inner” voice; Liszt is the one who takes that voice and dramatizes it.

Asked about returning to a composer he had played as a teenager, Sunwoo was wry and reflective. He has no recording from those years, but if he listened back, he suspected he would hear something technically refined, but not much more.

Tracklist
01. Liszt: Die Gräberinsel (After Lied by Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), S. 485b
02. Liszt: Consolations, S. 172: No. 3 in D-Flat Major. Lento, placido
03. Liszt: Liebesträume, S. 541: No. 3, O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst!
04. Liszt: Gretchen am Spinnrade, S. 558 No. 8 (After Schubert, D. 118)
05. Liszt: Müllerlieder von Franz Schubert, S. 565 (1879 2nd Version): II. Der Müller und der Bach (After D. 795/19)
06. Liszt: Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, S. 547 No. 1 (After Mendelssohn)
07. Liszt: Liebeslied Widmung, S. 566 (After Schumann, Op. 25/1)
08. Liszt: Dessauers Lieder, S. 485: I. Lockung
09. Liszt: Rigoletto de Verdi, Concert Paraphrase, S. 434
10. Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514
11. Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-Sharp Minor, S. 244 No. 2