Echoes in the mists

Echoes in the Mists by Tae-Hyung Kim is a poetic journey through a century of piano music, drawing a line from early Romanticism to early modernism. The album opens with Franz Liszt's masterful transcriptions of Schubert's songs - works that preserve the lyrical intimacy of the songs while simultaneously expanding their expressive possibilities on the piano. These include Frühlingsglaube, Ständchen by Shakespeare and fragments from Die schöne Müllerin, in which Liszt illuminates Schubert's emotional worlds with refined pianistic coloring and occasionally a virtuosic flourish. Central to the program are Robert Schumann's Waldszenen, a deeply introspective cycle in which nine miniatures form an imaginative, poetic walk through an inner forest - alternating between joy, mystery, tenderness and melancholy. With this selection, Kim makes the closely interwoven sonic worlds of Schubert, Schumann and Liszt audible and shows both continuity and development within the Romantic tradition. The second half of the album focuses on a different aesthetic with Leoš Janáček's V mlhách (In the Mist), composed in 1912 - a work characterized by personal grief and the composer's search for a condensed form of expression in his late style. The four movements form one psychological landscape shrouded in mist, in which fragmentary motifs, speech-like rhythms and changing tonal colors create a fragile, introspective atmosphere. Although faint traces of Debussy's influence can be heard - particularly in the luminous opening and closing sections - the music remains unmistakably Janáček in its tension, fatalism and emotional directness. By placing these radically different composers side by side, Kim creates an album that reflects the shift in piano writing from Romantic lyricism to early modern expression and invites listeners to hear how echoes from the past resound in changing musical languages.