Playing Bach from a teacher's score, Son Min-soo sees '24 stars in the night sky'

Hyperion debut album features Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1

Dedicated to late teacher Russell Sherman, who died in 2023

Recital at Seoul Arts Center set for Oct. 27

"Et tu, Brute?"

Those are the last words Shakespeare gave Julius Caesar — the cry of a man betrayed by the one he trusted most. The line inspired a poem by a master musician. American pianist Russell Sherman wrote it as a kind of working note alongside the C minor Prelude, No. 2 from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1.

About a year after Sherman's death, his wife — pianist Byun Hwa-kyung — handed his annotated score of the Well-Tempered Clavier to one of his longest-standing students, Son Min-soo.

"He used to joke that he needed to record and perform the Well-Tempered Clavier someday, but never had the time because he was too busy teaching us," Son said. "Going through that score, tracing every mark he left behind, I was moved beyond words. There were moments of genuine awe — it felt as if I had gone back in time and was taking a lesson from him again."

Reflecting on Sherman's poem, Son said he realized "this is what he was imagining in this piece" and that "I could feel a world far wider than anything I had conceived." But the score held more than poetry. The fingerings — notations indicating which finger should press which key — puzzled him at first. On closer study, he found they made perfect sense. "Every choice was in service of the music, not in any way meant to make the piano easier to play," he said. That score became the single greatest catalyst for his return to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

Son has now signed an exclusive contract with British classical label Hyperion and released his debut album: Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, out Tuesday — the very work his teacher had always put off. The album is dedicated to Sherman, who died in 2023. Also known as the teacher of pianist Lim Yunchan, Son recently met with reporters and described the recording process as "entering, as a musician, a path of hardship."

Bach as universe: '24 stars in the night sky'

From his teacher's handwriting, Son's gaze turned toward the universe that is Bach. He likened the Well-Tempered Clavier to "24 stars in the night sky." Book 1 comprises 48 pieces — a prelude and fugue paired in each of 24 keys, 12 major and 12 minor. His Goldberg Variations recording was named one of The New York Times' best classical albums of 2011; that work traced a journey of layered variations returning to the opening aria. The Well-Tempered Clavier opens an entirely different horizon.

"If the Goldberg has the power to draw listeners along naturally — like Bach's triangular architecture of the Holy Trinity, posing questions about the divine — the Well-Tempered Clavier is something different," Son said. "It contains nearly every complex question and emotion a human being encounters in life, spread across 24 journeys. I think of it as gazing at 24 stars in the night sky and sharing one long journey together."

The road to those stars was long and painful. On Dec. 31, 2008, Son injured his right hand in an accident. For three years he could not use it at all; trying to compensate, he overworked his left hand until it, too, broke down. When the right hand finally healed, the left was in "the worst condition," and he ultimately had surgery on that hand as well. "The left hand I had overworked held on to me until the very end and would not let go," he said. Treatment stretched from 2008 until around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Every day back then was survival mode," he said. "I asked myself: if I cannot perform, what meaning can I find in living? When I searched for what I, as a musician, must do with this one life, the first answers that came to me were Beethoven's sonatas and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier."

Working through the Beethoven sonatas became, for him, "the process of finding my lost hand again." He recalled reading about golfer Tiger Woods spending years reworking a single element of his swing, and said it led him to sit at the piano and "think about the most natural way to approach the instrument." He said he has now "completely freed" himself from the arm pain.

"It felt unbearably cruel, being a pianist," he said. "And yet I tried not to talk about it, because I know all too well that what I went through is nothing compared to what others face in life. I am almost embarrassed to bring it up."

From teacher to student: Sherman, Byun and Lim Yunchan

Son returned again and again to his teachers, Russell Sherman and Byun Hwa-kyung. "I know all too well that without the two of them I would be nothing," he said. Whenever an unresolved musical question confronts him, his first instinct is to ask himself what Sherman would have thought and how he would have put it. What he inherited from his teacher was not technique but music itself — a way of approaching each day of life.

"Whether the question was musical or about life, their teaching was: do not reach a conclusion too quickly; keep exploring infinite possibilities," he said. "That is why I believe it is a performer's fate that today's performance must differ from tomorrow's. If I were still playing the way I did 15 years ago, I imagine I would be in serious trouble."

The attitude he received from his teachers now passes to the next generation. Son is the teacher who trained Lim Yunchan. In 2017, while still wrestling with the pain in his hands, he met a 13-year-old Lim at the Korea National University of Arts gifted education program. Lim has cited Son's counsel — "Bach is our greatest ancestor and source" — in connection with his own Goldberg Variations album. Yet Son has not sought to enlarge his role as teacher behind his student's achievements. He has also pushed back on the widely circulated story that he recommended the Goldberg to Lim. "I did not recommend it," he said.

"In almost our very first lesson I suggested we study the Well-Tempered Clavier, but it was Yunchan who wanted to play the Goldberg first," Son said. "At one lesson he came in having already studied about ten variations on his own. I was surprised, but I told him it might be better to study other works and gain more experience before going back to it. The decision on when to do that was also Yunchan's."

What Son tries to preserve alongside his students — Lim among them — is not the authority of someone who hands down answers, but the humility of someone who searches alongside them. "I know all too well how full of shortcomings I am, so I try to listen carefully to what a student says and what questions they ask," he said. "Continuing to follow the questions that arise from that, and searching together — that seems to be the work I do." He added that teaching "is an extension of my own practice, a process of giving and receiving," and that "it often turns out to be the process in which I learn the most."

It is also hard to miss how South Korea's classical music world in particular cheers for prodigies and the fresh faces who stand out at competitions. Son, however, affirmed the role of the new generation.

"It is so important for a new generation to bring its own voice out into the world," he said. "If the new generation has nothing better to offer than the one before it, that is something a society needs to think hard about." And yet, he added, "every performer has their own place," and "I simply want to think about what I can do in my place and communicate through music." He acknowledged it was not a question answerable in a sentence or two, and deferred a wiser answer to another occasion. His reason for feeling he must play Bach now connects to that same thought.

"We are living in a flood of information that forces us to make quick choices," he said. "When one voice rises above the rest, the majority tends to follow it. But in Bach's fugues, every voice matters, and even the smallest, most delicate voice must be heard. What we need to ask is how all these voices can coexist in harmony."

The album was recorded at Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps with producer Hans Kipper. Having completed a recording process he described as going "as deep as I could go, note by note," Son now brings his Bach to the concert stage — a recital at Seoul Arts Center on Oct. 27. "If the recording was a process of going as deep as possible into each note, the performance will be a process of sharing, within the one unrepeatable moment given to performer and audience alike, whatever happens in that space," he said. "I hope Bach's music does not end with that day's performance, but becomes a time for questions — one that listeners can return to and keep finding new meaning in."

shee@heraldcorp.com