Paik talks about the PAIK & BEETHOVEN project
Pianist HAESUN PAIK has been hailed as a “sensitive and thinking musician first and an awesome technician second” (Los Angeles Times) with a “big and individual personality” (New York Times), whose performances are “a wonder — elastic, mercurial, charged with meaning, surprising” (Boston Globe) and “a rare example of technique actually serving both idea and feeling, head and heart” (Musical America).
Having garnered top prizes at international piano competitions such as the Queen Elisabeth, Leeds, William Kapell, and the Tchaikovsky, Ms. Paik has performed concerts around the world in solo recitals, concerti with orchestra, and chamber music.
Ms. Paik has appeared as a soloist under the baton of Mikhail Pletnev, Sir Simon Rattle, Vassily Sinaisky, Dmitri Kitaenko, Stanislav Skrovaczewski, and Myung Whun Chung, to name a few. She performed with orchestras including the Boston, National, London, City of Birmingham, Belgium National, Osaka, NHK, and KBS Symphony Orchestras, the Munich, Radio France, Tokyo, Warsaw, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Russian National Orchestra.
Ms. Paik has appeared frequently in recitals throughout the U.S. at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and Jordan Hall in Boston. Her international tours brought her to appear in major concert halls of Beijing Brussels, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Cologne, Frankfurt, Kyoto, Luxembourg, Moscow, Munich, Osaka, Paris, Riga, Rome, Santiago, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and Zurich among others.
She appeared at numerous international music festivals including the Beethoven Festival in Munich, Radio France Festival in Montpellier, Courchevel Music Festival in France, Dino Ciani Festival in Italy, Ishikawa Music Festival in Japan, Beijing International Music Festival & Academy, Orford Music Festival in Canada, Monadnock Music Festival in New Hampshire, International Keyboard Institute & Festival in New York, PianoSummer at New Paltz (New York), PYPA at Curtis (Philadelphia), the PyeongChang Music Festival & School, and the Busan Music Festival in Korea.
As a collaborative artist, Ms. Paik has performed with many distinguished musicians including cellist Anner Bylsma, Mischa Maisky, violist Nobuko Imai, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, in addition to the Borromeo and Jerusalem String Quartets. Her duo recording with cellist Laurence Lesser of the complete works by Beethoven for piano and cello was released by Bridge Records. Her debut and subsequent solo recordings can be heard on the EMI label.
Between 2016-17, performance highlights included appearances in Vienna’s Musikverein and the Berlin Philharmonic Hall as a soloist with the Daegu Philharmonic Orchestra’s European tour. She also performed with the Boston Philharmonic and the Akron Symphony
Orchestras in the U.S., as well as the Daejeon Philharmonic, KBS, and Ulsan Symphony Orchestras in Korea.
In the 2017-18 season, Ms. Paik will commence a Beethoven project performing all 32 Beethoven Sonatas and the 5 Piano Concerti. Following a six city recital tour of Korea which features a concert at Seoul Arts Center, she will perform the 5 Piano Concerti in 2018 and complete the Sonata cycle in 2019, presented by the new Lotte Concert Hall in Korea.
Furthermore, over the next three seasons, she will perform the complete Beethoven Piano Concerti again and the Triple Concerto with the New York Classical Players, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.
One of the most sought after pedagogical influences in Korea, Ms. Paik was the youngest pianist of her generation to be appointed as a music professor at Seoul National University, where she taught for ten years. She currently is a member of the piano faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She is also an artist-in-residence at the Catholic University of Daegu and serves as the Artistic Director of the Busan Music Festival in Korea. She gives master classes at institutions and festivals worldwide and has served as a juror in many international competitions including the Bösendorfer and Yamaha USASU, the Cleveland, the Hilton Head, the Honens, and the Seoul (Dong-A) international piano competitions.
HaeSun Paik demonstrated unmistakable musical talent at an early age, winning her first piano competition at the age of four. She came to the U.S. to continue her musical studies in Boston at the Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts, later earning degrees—including the Artist Diploma—from the New England Conservatory under the guidance of Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun. Ms. Paik’s artistic development was further influenced by her studies at the International Piano Foundation in Lake Como (Italy) where she worked with many distinguished artists such as Alicia de Larrocha, Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Rosalyn Tureck, and Alexis Weissenberg .