BBC Music Magazine
October 2025
Instrumental Choice

Gramophone Magazine
October 2025
Editor's Choice

Sueye Park (viulu)

Enescu: Impressions d'enfance for violin and piano, Op. 28: Ménétrier
Bartók: Sonata for Solo Violin, BB 124, Sz. 117
Ben-Haim: Sonata in G for Solo Violin, Op. 44
Zimmermann, B A: Sonata for solo violin
Ysaÿe: 6 Sonatas for Solo Violin, Op. 27, No. 2 in A Minor: II. Malinconia

Sueye Park is no stranger to solo violin recitals. After her recording of the Paganini Caprices (BIS2282) and a recital entitled Journey through a Century (BIS2492), both critically acclaimed, she brings us another solo project, Echoes of Exile, an undertaking that finds its raison dtre in todays very turbulent times. Park offers us different perspectives on the topic of exile with works composed between the 1920s and 1950s, by great composers who left their country as a result of political circumstances as well as by others who went into their own inner exile. Two pieces by composers who left their native lands for artistic reasons, Enescu and Ysae, frame three substantial and very contrasting works by composers forced into exile, either because their existence was threatened or because of a feeling of alienation within their respective countries. The works of Bartk and Ben-Haim show composers who, in their longing for their homelands, succeeded not only in emphasising the value of their culture even more strongly, but also in anchoring it within the environment into which they had entered. Zimmermanns sonata, with its unique expressive language, evokes the concerns of a young composer in the devastated Germany of the post-war period.

"If we needed any further proof that Sueye Park's intellectual programming muscles as are as strongly supple as her physical ones, her fifth album for BIS, for solo violin, firmly settles it." -Gramophone Magazine, October 2025