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Echoes in the mists
Franz Liszt - Franz Schubert - Robert Schumann - Leoš Janáček

Echoes in the mists

Tae-Hyung Kim

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0608917200461
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Catalog number: CC 720046
Releasedate: 06-03-26
- Challenge Classis debutant Tae-Hyung Kim brings profound sensitivity shaped by major international piano competition success and refined European and Korean training
- This album is a uniquely curated journey linking Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, and Janáček to illustrate the evolution of piano music from Romanticism to early modernism
- Exceptional Schubert–Liszt interpretations, highlighting Liszt’s most intimate and faithful song transcriptions with refined pianistic colour.
- A deeply poetic centerpiece with Schumann’s Waldszenen, performed as an imaginative inward journey through contrasting emotional landscapes
- A rare, psychologically charged reading of Janáček’s In the Mists, alos being the totle of the album, capturing its fragmentary, dramatic, and impressionistic qualities

Tae-Hyung Kim’s Echoes in the Mists is a poetic journey through a century of piano music, tracing a line from early Romanticism to early modernism. The album opens with Franz Liszt’s masterful transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder—works that preserve the songs’ lyrical intimacy while expanding their expressive possibilities on the piano. These include Frühlingsglaube, Ständchen von Shakespeare, and excerpts from Die schöne Müllerin, where Liszt illuminates Schubert’s emotional worlds with subtle pianistic colour and occasional virtuosic flourish. At the heart of the programme lies Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen, a deeply introspective cycle in which nine miniature scenes form an imaginative, poetic walk through an inner forest—alternating between joy, mystery, tenderness, and melancholy. Through this selection, Kim highlights the richly interconnected sound worlds of Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt, revealing both continuity and evolution within the Romantic tradition.

The album’s second half turns toward a different aesthetic with Leoš Janáček’s V mlhách (In the Mists), written in 1912, a work shaped by personal grief and the composer’s late-style search for distilled expression. Its four movements form a single, mist-shrouded psychological landscape, where fragmentary motives, speech-like rhythms, and shifting tonal colours create a fragile, introspective atmosphere. While faint traces of Debussy’s influence may be heard—particularly in the luminous openings and closings—the music remains unmistakably Janáček’s in its tension, fatalism, and emotional immediacy. By juxtaposing these radically different composers, Kim creates an album that reflects the transformation of piano writing from Romantic lyricism to early modern expression, inviting listeners to hear how echoes of the past resonate through changing musical languages.