Yeol Eum Son immerses herself in the limitless whimsical imagination of Mozart’s sonatas, and with this complete collection takes us on a voyage in a land of contrasts.

Yeol Eum Son has always been drawn to Mozart’s style, in her heart and in her fingers, and maintains a special relationship with his music. She likes to translate from this language, which she considers her mother tongue, the incredible ability to express different worlds, atmospheres and feeling.

“His music,” she says, “speaks of both sunshine and eternal night, extremes of heat and cold, elegance and farce, Lolita and Madonna.”

The Korean pianist, a newcomer at naïve, has achieved distinction in numerous international competitions, including the Tchaikovsky, Viotti, Rubinstein and Van Cliburn, and offers us with this polished collection full of contrasts a Mozart who is “passionate, dramatic and operatic, and extremely capricious.”

This colourful vision of the corpus of eighteen piano sonatas, imbued with all the necessary clarity and innocent state of mind, leads the listener cheerfully from a Turkish march to a peasant song, from a serenade for wind instruments to a wide range of variations.

Apart from the fact that she enjoyed “imagining a troupe of singers, a plot and some scenes,” Yeol Eum Son also, inspired by the composer’s improvising talents, allowed herself not to decide everything before the recording and to leave room for the inspiration of the moment. And if she is quite unable to choose one single sonata over all the others, K283 (no.5), K311 (no.8), K330 (no.10), K331 (no.11) and K333 (no.13) “have all been her favourites since [her] childhood.”