Juri Seo's debut album on Innova Recordings
Available on Amazon, Spotify, Itunes
"The extraordinary charm and inventiveness of composer Juri Seo’s piano music come into view within the first 10 seconds of this ingratiating compilation disc, as a brisk handful of chords keeps getting knocked off-kilter by a single dissonant note. [...] Also on display is a deep dive into the history of the instrument in the form of her Piano Sonata No. 1, which is subtitled “La Hammerklavier” and offers a winning gloss — sometimes abstract, sometimes point-by-point — on Beethoven’s legacy."
Joshua Kosman reviews Juri Seo's album Mostly Piano for the San Francisco Chronicle.
"There is as with the other works a somewhat startling freshness about the music... For the spinning world we are in I must simply iterate that Juri Seo is a modern original, and that her music on the current volume veers into breathtaking territory at times, and for all that never seems content to work inside the usual trends that occupy much of the contemporary music world."
Bravo!
Grego Applegate Edwards on Classica-Modern Music Review.
"un groove irresistibilmente funkeggiante"
Filippo Focosi on http://www.kathodik.it/
Read full review (in Italian)
“..traditional stylization with a hint of spoof [...] tonal syntax without limits with a clear counterpoint and strive for more complex infrastructure.”
Read full review (in Croatian)
"Through the piano, that most traditional of musical filters, Seo pours her eclectic influences and the results are coherent, but refracted and many-hued: Beethoven meets 20th-century avant-garde meets modern jazz. She scales the heights and plumbs the depths of the instrument..."
Anya Wassenberg on Art & Culture Maven
"Dashes of Gershwin are percussed by Beck on “La Hammerklavier” while Tolle crashes with the cimbalom on ”Etudes…”.’ The frisky “vi” has Rosenkranz and percussionist Mark Eichenberger going free and frantic. Is any of this on sheet music?"
George Harris on jazzweekly.com
Juri Seo's music for strings in collaboration with the Argus Quartet on Innova Recordings
“It is without refrain that I can say that Seo has mastered fluidity, the easiness of transition between poles that would seem irreconcilable. If you’d ask me where the border between all those things was, I’d say it’s everywhere, at all times, and it’s not made for division, but for connection.”
David Murrieta Flores reviews Juri Seo's album Respiri for a closer listen.
"On the title track of Respiri, delicate scales and spears of sound thread among densely packed, shifting chords that swell and subside. Juri Seo was specifically inspired by the late composer Jonathan Harvey’s musical evocations of breathing. But from a broader perspective, the piece’s seven and a half minutes are a deep nod to the striving for original forms of beauty that has taken place over the last century-plus, since the Romantic movement gave way to modernism."
Jon Sobel reviews Respiri for blogcritics.org
"Respiri could be described in thematic terms as a meditation on life, death, change, and rebirth."
Textura reviews Respiri
"Suite for Cello, dove il confronto con J.S. Bach non intimorisce la Seo, ma anzi ne stimola la fervida fantasia, non da ultimo timbrica.”
(the confrontation with J.S. Bach does not intimidate Seo, but rather stimulates her fervent imagination, not least the timbre.)
Pilippo Focosi reviews Respiri for Kathodik
"By building on strong premises and each seeking out a richer formal and dramatic design than the last, the pieces point to promising future directions; Seo’s listeners will find in Respiri an encouraging step forward on an open-ended path.”
Andrew Stock reviews Respiri for icareifyoulisten.com
“[Suite for Cello], in five movements, is Seo's exploration of memory and identity. It's appropriately both cerebral and emotional in tone, with contrapuntal elements that are subverted by deconstruction.”
Anya Wassenberg reviews Respiri on Art and Culture Maven