“Ms. Kim’s performance of this marvellous composition is pristine, and marked with exceptional clarity. Every note seems placed with careful thought, and there is no doubt that she has given the score a very detailed reading. From beginning to end, Ravel’s balance of technical brilliance and nuanced colors are brought to light with a deceptive ease of execution which makes this recording worth listening!”

Pierre van der Westhuizen

Executive Director, Cleveland International Piano Competition

“In this unedited performance of Miroirs, Ms. Kim shows the extent of her gift for portraying the various and diverse moods in Ravel's music, and for giving each of them a vibrant personality of their own.  Although the intelligence of her musicianship is ever-present, one enjoys the playing for more visceral reasons as well--the lush sound, the pianism, and the wide palette of colors.  This very fine performance of this important and difficult piano piece merits repeated listening!”

Frank Weinstock

Professor Emeritus of Piano (University of Cincinnati)

“In her recording of Ravel's Miroirs, Chung-Ha Kim sensitively depicts the character of each movement with great variety of tone and contrast.  Particularly evocative is her performance of Une Barque sur l'Ocean."

Joshua Russell

Pianist

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A Palace of Strangers Is No City tells the story of two lovers on opposite sides of an occupied city. The male character, having narrowly escaped the random police arrests, is now officially a fugitive and flees to his fiancée’s house by going through Old Town.  That medieval city center, with its tangle of streets, becomes the primary setting of the story and the meditative landscape of the character’s flight.  Full of questions about whom to trust, what to believe, and making use of a highly unusual second-person narrator, the sequence feels dreamlike and surreal.

Written in the traditions of fabulist literature and prose poetry, the sequence hybridizes the narrative, discursive tendencies of prose with the imagistic, elliptical tendencies of poetry.  In other words, the prose poem can often read like a dream: it moves along like a story in which strange, unexpected things can happen, and they feel quite natural.

The city has been loosely modeled on Prague and the sequence includes lines from Czech opera, so the arrangement alternates with musical excerpts from Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s On An Overgrown Path.

On An Overgrown Path, a collection of 15 piano pieces, was composed during the first decade of the 20th century. It displays influences of Moravian folk songs and is programmatic: the first ten pieces each have a title that describes a place, a state of mind, or an action. Besides providing miniature snapshots of Janáček’s native region, Moravia, these pieces are also very personal, transcending national boundaries with their quiet beauty and lyricism.

A Palace of Strangers Is No City

On An Overgrown Path

Leoš Janáček

Carnival of Animals

Camille Saint-Saëns