The Handel Project: Handel-Suites & Brahms-Variations – Seong-Jin Cho

George Frideric Handel’s suites for keyboard instrument are foreign to most concert pianists. With his album “The Handel Project,” 28-year-old South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho wants to shed new light on these soulful works of Baroque music. Recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, he has chosen his three favorites from Handel’s first collection of “Suites de pièces pour le clavecin”: the suites HWV 427, 430 and 433. After years of studying music from later eras, Handel’s keyboard works came into his focus, not least because of their wealth of musical ideas and melodic invention. “For me, Handel’s music comes from the heart, people can easily follow it,” Cho says, eschewing the right pedal as much as possible in his interpretation, but modifying some of the dynamic markings to exploit the potential of the modern grand piano. But Cho was also interested in Handel’s influence on later composers, so he decided to record Johannes Brahms’ creative response to Handel’s music as well: Brahms’ put his virtuosic “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel” on paper within a few weeks in September 1861. For Cho, these are “the finest variations ever written.” The album closes with two single movements by Handel: the Sarabande in B flat major, HWV 440 and the Minuet in G minor – the latter in a magical arrangement by Wilhelm Kempff.