Esther Yoo: Love Symposium
Deutsche Grammophon

With Love Symposium, the prodigiously gifted London-based violinist Esther Yoo partners with the Long Yu-conducted Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a tremendous showcase of her eloquent playing. Particularly inspired is the inclusion of Leonard Bernstein's Serenade (1954), based on Plato's Symposium and less frequently recorded than the two works following it, Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending and Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony “Adagietto.” Williams' beloved setting offers the ultimate expressive vehicle for a violinist of Yoo's calibre, and Mahler's is rendered less familiar by appearing in a new chamber arrangement. Rounding out the release are settings that while short leave a memorable mark, Edward Elgar's Salut d'Amour and, from the 2017 film The Greatest Showman, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's song "Never Enough” (both it and the “Adagietto” are in new arrangements by Iain Farrington). If Yoo, Yu, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra sound like a good fit, they should: she's toured with them and was the RPO's first artist-in-residence.

As someone tri-cultural, Yoo's life experiences profoundly inform her playing. Born in the United States, she grew up and was educated in Europe whilst also proudly embracing her Korean heritage. After making her concerto debut at eight, she won the International Sibelius Violin Competition at sixteen and since then has enjoyed a career that's seen her perform with leading conductors and orchestras around the world. Yoo's a passionate new music advocate with several concerto albums to her name and is also a Professor of Violin at the Royal College of Music. On this release, her curatorial choices reflect her wish to explore love in all its guises as opposed to the romantic one only. There's the deep feeling we have for lovers, close friends, and family, but love also includes, of course, pain and suffering, and can also engender the transcendent bliss we experience when love inhabits the spiritual realm.

Recorded in September 2024 at Henry Wood Hall in London, the album begins with Bernstein's five-part treatment of Plato's Symposium, the Socratic dialogue famously grounded in pontifications about love by renowned Athenian thinkers. Scored for solo violin, strings, harp and percussion, the work opens with a lovely solo violin theme (musically equivalent to Phaedrus's lyrical ode to Eros) that surfaces throughout the half-hour piece, much as the “love” theme would have been passed from one symposium member to another to be broached from a different angle. Though Bernstein stressed that the concerto-like Serenade wasn't crafted as a literal musical transcription of their speeches, it's tempting to regard it that way when each movement has a particular figure attached to it. The haunting solo violin theme with which the work begins blossoms quickly when strings join the soloist and then full ensemble. Yoo blithely dances across the orchestra, her gestures assured whether they're dance-driven or romantic. Following that adventurous overture, we move to a riposte from the playwright Aristophanes marked by moments of poignant tenderness and tremulous supplication. A scherzo associated with the doctor Eryximachus adds a brief interjection of levity before an adagio softens the mood with a paean to love that Yoo and company articulate with artful nuance and drama. Speaking of which, the work reaches its dramatic zenith with the Socrates-associated finale and the implied weight of his contribution to the Symposium; it's not without a lighter side, however, as shown by its flirtation with jazz-blues gestures reminiscent of West Side Story, for example. While not, formally speaking, identified as a concerto, there's no denying Serenade provides a tremendous showcase for the soloist, and Yoo makes the most of the opportunity in a turn one could call star-making if she weren't already one.

The love explored in The Lark Ascending is, of course, love of nature. Inspired by George Meredith's same-titled poem, Vaughan Williams' poetic vision of the English countryside was sketched out by 1914 but, interrupted by WWI, not finished until 1920. The soloist must be careful to not rush the opening section, and for the most part Yoo delivers the material at a pace that aligns itself to the transporting character of the music. Among the things that distinguish her performance are unerring pitch and sensitive handling of dynamics, and her trilling evocation of the lark's graceful flight convinces too. Presented in an arrangement for solo violin, harp, and seven string players (with Yoo leading the conductor-less group), the heartfelt “Adagietto,” Mahler's love letter to his wife Alma, assumes a more intimate guise than the conventional one for strings and harp. Yoo and the ensembles impress during both works' introspective passages and their expressions of longing and grandeur.

March 2026