Bokyung Byun: The Latest Naxos “Laureate”

courtesy of Naxos of America

In 1994 Naxos Records decided to make a commitment to focus on recordings of the classical guitar and launched what is now called the Guitar Collection. That collection, in turn, includes a Laureate Series, which provides a recording platform for competition winners that are just beginning their careers. This past Friday saw the release of the latest Laureate Series album. This is a solo guitar recital by Bokyung Byun, who won the 2021 Guitar Foundation of America (GFA) Competition.

Byun’s recital reaches back to the early eighteenth century with transcriptions of keyboard sonatas by Carlos Seixas. However, the better part of the album is devoted to works composed in 2010 and later, the most recent of these having been written last year. As a result, the overall chronology elides the entire nineteenth century and includes only two twentieth-century compositions.

That latter offering accounts for the first three tracks on the album. This is the Opus 176 of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, three short pieces collected under the title Preludi mediterranei (Mediterranean preludes), composed in 1955. This is highly affable music, allowing the listener to appreciate the intricacies of Byun’s finger-work in settings of engaging melodic content. A bit more ambitious is the following track, a set of variations composed by Manuel Ponce in 1926.

At the early end of the timeline, Byun performs a successive pair of keyboard sonatas by Seixas, arranged for guitar by Rebeca Oliveira. Both sonatas are in the key of D minor. This follows the same approach that can be found in some of the many keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. Seixas was based in Lisbon, where he served as court organist and harpsichordist to John V of Portugal. At that same time Scarlatti was serving as director of the court cathedral; and he seems to have established a “mutual admiration society” with Seixas. Many listeners are probably familiar with the Scarlatti sonatas that Andrés Segovia arranged for guitar, and Byun has done us a service by giving Scarlatti’s colleague the attention he deserves.

The recent works are the ones that most deserve repeated listening encounters. In “order of appearance” on the album, the composers are João Luiz, Celil Refik Kaya, Angel Lam, Leo Brouwer, and Clarice Assad. Brouwer is probably the best known of these. He composed “La Gran Sarabanda” for the 2018 GFA Competition; and he used the opportunity to join the ranks of the many past composers that had explored approaches to variations on the “Folia” theme.

Personally, I have enjoyed following Assad’s efforts as a composer. “The Last Song” has been given an impressive number of different instrumental settings. These include, piano and orchestra, two guitars, and solo piano. The solo guitar arrangement seems to be the result of a “committee,” whose members are Byron Fogo, David Russell, and Ondrej Veselý. Assad’s engaging rhetoric of quietude provides the perfect way to conclude the rich diversity of selections on this album.