Delightful and original release from Ian Yungwook Yoo. Yoo, who won first prize at the 2007 Beethoven Competition in Bonn, delivers these variation sets with incredible panache…the full 74 minutes are filled with powerful and technically brilliant playing.

To read the complete review, please visit American Record Guide online.

This disc is most welcome for the inclusion of four seldom-heard and very entertaining sets of variations based on themes by Beethoven’s Viennese contemporaries Haibel, Wranitsky, Salieri, and Süssmayr. The pieces come from Beethoven’s “works without opus” and were composed between 1796 and 1799. Ian Yungwook Yoo has chosen some of the more virtuosic of Beethoven’s many variation sets, others of which are more modest teaching pieces. The Six Variations, op. 76, on the Turkish march from The Ruins of Athens is encountered a little more often and the “Eroica” set is well known, but not recorded all that often. The least formulaic and most enjoyable of the lesser-known sets is the 12 Variations on the Russian Dance from Paul Wranitzky’s Waldmädchen. (Wranitzky’s Singspiel Oberon served as a model for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte). Maybe a catchier title would entice more pianists to take up this piece, but it has not gone unnoticed by the likes of Ashkenazy, Gilels, and Cziffra, who recorded it.

Yoo plays with all of the energetic assurance that one would expect from a Juilliard-trained winner of several major competitions. He relates well to the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the typically Beethovenian combination of rambunctiousness and elegance in these display pieces. The only other performance that I know of these works is Alfred Brendel’s early Vox recording, and Yoo’s version surpasses it with more fluent, happier-sounding playing. (A John Ogden recording of some of them looks intriguing.)

Yoo’s “Eroica” Variations, while very efficiently played, are not as successful. The problem may lie with the work’s title. If it were not associated with the later “Eroica” Symphony and known only as “15 Variations on a Theme from the Ballet The Creatures of Prometheus,” pianists might be more likely to perceive that the work is in large part comic and not heroic in tone. (That is, if they aren’t misled by the connotations of “Prometheus” and concentrate on “ballet.”)

In the three short variations that add voices to the opening bass line, Yoo sounds earnest rather than playful, missing some possibilities of comic timing that are inherent in the staccatos, rests, and fermatas if treated simply. (He’s certainly capable of this kind of playing. Just listen to the opening of the Süssmayr variations to hear a gentler touch and more elegant timing.) The comic mood of the subsequent theme and 13 variations ranges from light-hearted to nose thumbing. Yoo plays them with speed and control but I hear few if any interpretive decisons—an unusual voicing, pedaling, or tempo choice—that sound like distinctive, personal touches. (Olli Mustonen’s quirky performance goes to an opposite, sometimes self-indulgent extreme, but its improvisatory quality is appropriate.)

With the serious, chromatic 14th variation in E♭-Minor, a transformation omore....

Review By Brian Reinhart ,MusicWeb International,November 2010

The cover presents a striking image: the conquering hero, immortalized in stone, looks out over a sea of fire. He stands alone against the flames, boldly unconcerned. It is a wonderful image of Beethoven the warrior, the master of musical struggles.

The contents of this CD come from a very different side of Beethoven. This recital showcases Beethoven’s witty side, his penchant for virtuosic invention, and his growth as a creative mind. These are six sets of themes and variations, only two of them published. The other four are early works which reveal the genesis of ideas and techniques which would later become the composer’s mainstays. Any lover of Beethoven ought to hear this.

It's a constant source of amazement to me how foreign-born (in the non-European sense) artists are able to absorb western music (and other art form) values, and revel in them. Here is a case in point: this Korean-born pianist could hold his own, and even better many of his western contemporaries. Moreover, not only does he more than do justice to the monumental "Eroica" variations; he is to be doubly congratulated for unearthing a slew of other - albeit minor variations, that quite possibly are unavailable on other labels. Bravo!

Review By James Manheim,Allmusic.com,September 2010

With the exception of the Six variations for piano in D major, Op. 76, all the music here comes from early in Beethoven’s career, and all of it is, sure enough for piano and in the variation form. Yet in some respects the pieces are an odd grouping, consisting of one large, ambitious piece and five rather lightweight ones. Of the latter, Beethoven declined to assign opus numbers to four of them, and even the Six variations, which share a theme with the flamboyant theater music for The Ruins of Athens, contrast in their idiom with the intricate and personal piano sonatas and quartets of the period. There’s some second-drawer Beethoven here, and the young Korean pianist Ian Yungwook Yoo seems to recognize this, bifurcating his style sharply between the Eroica Variations and Fugue on an original theme in E flat major, Op. 35, and the rest of the music. In the smaller pieces he is technically clean and circumspect, but in the Eroica variations he offers a daring reading. This variation set shares a theme with not one but two other pieces, the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus and the finale of the Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55, “Eroica,” and Yoo seems to want to delve into why Beethoven was fascinated by it. He offers a dramatic version that emphasizes the theme’s odd shape and full stop on the high dominant B flat, repeated three times in a manner reminiscent of music for the stage. Yoo’s muscular reading is backed up by full technical facility and definitely holds the listener’s attention...the recording stands out from the crowd and can start interesting debates among people who know the piece well. Strong sound from the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto is a plus.