Violinist.com: Interview with Esther Yoo

Esther Yoo, one of the world’s leading violinists, recently released Love Symposium on Deutsche Grammophon. It is her most personal album yet. The centerpiece of the album, which features London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra led by the preeminent conductor Long Yu, is the Serenade after Plato’s Symposium, one of Bernstein’s most lyrical and enduring orchestral works.

Love Symposium is "an exploration of the many different aspects and forms of love," Yoo, the RPO’s first artist-in-residence, told Violinist.com. "It's an invitation for listeners to experience a philosophical and an emotional discovery of love - through music."

From the beginning, music has provided an important source of connection for Yoo. As a painfully shy child, "music was my most comfortable means of communication," she said. "Somehow I wasn't shy about being on stage, playing the violin or the piano for someone." For her, the violin best conveyed the range emotions that she wished to express.

Each of Yoo’s selections for Love Symposium is a portrait of a different kind of love — a reflection of love in all its guises, from the philosophical ideas found in the Symposium to the love of nature, family, friends, significant others, and, most importantly, “the ever-evolving love we learn to give ourselves,” according to Yoo's program note. “We often think of love in music as something purely romantic and idealized, but I wanted to create a sound world where we experience real love—the blissfully transcendent, the powerfully intoxicating, the gut-wrenchingly painful, and everything in between.”

Read the Violinist.com feature here.