Unsuk Chin

Unsuk Chin has achieved worldwide recognition through its immediate sensuality and intense colors. Her sound world glitters, sparkles and flashes in seemingly inexhaustible transformations of dense, polyphonic instrumental textures, generating ever-new constellations of sound. Yet the originality of her work lies not merely in its dazzling surfaces or refined orchestration, but in the multidimensional complexity of her compositional thinking, where color and structure form two sides of the same coin.

Chin has consistently resisted both aesthetic fashion and commercial superficiality, addressing the listener without compromise. As she stated on receiving the Arnold Schoenberg Prize in 2005, “complexity and communication need not be incommensurable quantities.” Although born in Korea and later settling in Germany, Chin does not seek to incorporate “authentic” Asian musical materials. Instead, her references to cultural traditions function as allusions and illusions — imagined, invented and transformed through her own musical language.

This recording brings together three key works that illuminate different facets of Chin’s aesthetic. Gougalōn, inspired by childhood memories of itinerant street theatre, unfolds as a sequence of vividly characterized scenes, driven by highly expressive percussion and deliberately unconventional instrumental colors.

Graffiti, written for large ensemble, explores a kaleidoscopic range of textures and contrasts, oscillating between roughness and refinement, complexity and transparency. At the centre of the programme stands the Double Concerto for piano, percussion and ensemble, in which soloists and ensemble merge into a single “super-instrument”, producing extraordinarily intricate, poly-rhythmic processes.

Performed by the Ensemble intercontemporain under the direction of Pierre Bleuse, with soloists Samuel Favre and Dimitri Vassilakis, this album captures the intensity, precision and expressive power required to bring Chin’s uncompromising musical vision fully to life.

Ensemble intercontemporain
Pierre Bleuse, Conductor