Yeol Eum Son

Neville Marriner's last recording was Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, made in 2016 with Yeol Eum Son at the keyboard — a fitting instrument for it, since Mozart has been the composer she keeps returning to. Born in Wonju in 1986, she studied from the age of twelve with Kim Dae-jin and from 2006 in Hannover with Arie Vardi. The competition years brought a bronze medal at the Rubinstein and a place in the final of the Chopin, both in 2005; silver at the Van Cliburn in 2009, with the chamber-music award beside it; and silver at the Tchaikovsky in 2011, again with prizes for chamber playing and for the commissioned work. The complete Mozart piano sonatas appeared on Naïve in 2023 and the Ravel concertos in 2025. She was artistic director of the Music in PyeongChang festival from 2018 to 2022, and for years wrote a monthly column for JoongAng Sunday, later gathered into a book. In 2023 she played with the İzmir State Symphony Orchestra in a concert shared with the violinist Svetlin Roussev. In 2004 Lorin Maazel took her as soloist on the New York Philharmonic's Asian tour and engaged her again four years later. She has played with the Israel Philharmonic, the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the philharmonics of Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, Rotterdam and Seattle, under Valery Gergiev, Dmitri Kitaenko, Keith Lockhart and Yuri Bashmet. Harmonia Mundi issued her Van Cliburn performances and her complete Chopin études, and at Bad Kissingen in 2008 she won the contest the German critics there call the Piano Olympics.