Hue (쉼)
is an album about the pause that is never truly still. Each work here — Beethoven's Op. 77, Mendelssohn's Fantasy, Ravel's La Valse, Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody — inhabits the form of fantasy: music that refuses to resolve prematurely, that insists on wandering as its own kind of rigor. Like color, which exists only in contrast and in the spaces between, to rest is not to stop but to suspend — to hold a breath in which everything remains open.
Beethoven’s Fantasia is divided into two sections. In the first section, Beethoven maximizes improvisational style with a repeated theme interspersed with unpredictable scalar passages. There are also frequent changes in key, time signature, and overall character. The second section features variations on a melody, with small bridges linking each one together. Enjoy how Beethoven freely juxtaposes scales and broken chords throughout the entire works, as though following his train of thoughts!
The Mendelssohn Fantasie comprises three distinct sections- low, moderate, fast- which call into question the boundary between sonata and fantasy. While some have construed these sections as separate movements, Mendelssohn gives no concrete indications, such as tempo markings or final bar lines, that this was his intention. While the middle section features an active, folk-like rhythm, and the last one a fast, active, and dynamic character, the first movement is more fantasy-like, with quasi-improvisatory arpeggio passages that conjure up the sound of a harp.
Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody brings together the imaginative improvisational style and sectional organization that characterizes many fantasies with the rhythms of Spanish dances. The Spanish flair of the work arises from two famous themes of ancient Spanish origin: La Folia and Jota Aragonese.
Ravel first composed La valse for orchestra before making a two-piano version and then finally an arrangement for solo piano. The work is an homage to the Viennese waltz and the elegance of the old world before the First World War. While dance and its many forms had long been an organizing formal principle in short works, La valse engages this tradition in a unique way: Ravel gradually forms the Viennese dance from motivic whisperings, which eventually becomes the explosive thematic material for the entire mid-length work.