Lee Hae-rin is a City Desk reporter at The Korea Times, covering social issues, tourism and taekwondo. She is passionate about speaking up for the rights of minorities, including women, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and animals as well as discovering the latest makgeolli trend in town. Feel free to reach her at lhr@koreatimes.co.kr.
INTERVIEW Organists Olivier Latry and Lee Shin-young return to Seoul after 8 years for homecoming duet
Organists Lee Shin-young and Olivier Latry / Courtesy of Lotte Foundation for Arts
By Lee Hae-rin
Internationally acclaimed organists on unusual partnership, homecoming and Korea's growing interest in organ music
It is a strikng image: two musicians sharing a narrow bench, their hands crossed crossing hands over keyboards as four feet delicately coordinate over pedals. For married organists Olivier Latry and Lee Shin-young, the organ is a stage where they work together as a single musical mind.
The couple will bring their partnership to Seoul’s Lotte Concert Hall on Oct. 6 in “Four Hands,” their first Korean appearance together in eight years. The program moves from Rameau to Stravinsky, revealing the organ as a rhythmic, theatrical and orchestral instrument.
From restraint to musical trust
In a recent written interview with The Korea Times, the duo said their partnership began with a restraint.
Latry, then 23 and a titular organist at Notre-Dame de Paris, said he fell in love with Lee when she entered his class at the Paris Conservatoire. “That was not easy, not to show anything during her studies,” he said, adding that he waited eight years until she was no longer his student to reveal his feelings.
Lee recalled him as disciplined and reserved, but exceptionally severe in her lessons. After lessons, she sometimes telephoned her mother in Korea and wondered whether she should continue her studies there. Years after graduation, Latry told her the stern approach was intended to keep an emotional distance and Lee believes that uncompromising training prepared her for a life in professional music.
For the couple, four-hand organ playing is both an exercise in musical unity and a carefully negotiated physical challenge.
“The choreography really takes place at the organ console,” Latry said. “Each movement has to be calculated, assimilated. We have to find our own space without disturbing each other.”
Lee noted that “the performance environment is more confined than one might think” with the bench often too narrow for two people. She also joked that Latry’s larger hands sometimes leave hers trapped, a pain that “lingers for quite a long time.”
Their history now flows into their performances.
Lee said clashes are rare when they perform together because they “naturally understand the musical direction each of us pursues,” despite different upbringings and training. What enables that unity, she said, is their shared commitment to “transparency and honesty” and never placing the performer before the music.
“Our 'complicité (chemistry)' on stage is just a reflection of our 'complicité' in the current life,” Latry said. “Most of the things like one person. We have got the same musical sense, the same feeling; we breathe music in the same way.”
Latry praises Lee’s “ability, musicianship and concentration,” saying that he feels “totally confident” beside her, while Lee says her husband possesses every quality of a great performer, calling him a musician so exceptional that “it would take a whole book” to properly describe him.
Organists Lee Shin-young and Olivier Latry perform together in this provided photo. Courtesy of Lotte Foundation for Arts
Duets as artistic choice
Working as a duo is not the center of their professional identities. Both remain active soloists and often tour separately.
Last summer, Lee was in Canada while Latry was in China. They play together about five times a year, Latry said, and only when a score belongs on one organ. “It is not our wish to play absolutely as a duo; that would happen only if we are convinced that some pieces can work that way,” he said. “If not, we don’t do it.”
That selectiveness shapes the Seoul program.
The first half moves through Rameau’s “Dance of the Savages,” Bach’s Chaconne, Ravel’s “Daybreak” from "Daphnis et Chloe” and Lee’s arrangement of Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances.” The second half is devoted to “The Rite of Spring,” a four-hand showcase of rhythm and color.
Latry hopes the program will overturn assumptions about the organ, as its sustained sound becomes “more percussive, almost against its first nature,” praising it as “a very versatile instrument.”
For “The Rite of Spring,” they do not seek to imitate orchestral detail but to create color while respecting the organ’s voice. Lee said while hands change stops and control the swell box, the pedals generate its rhythmic drive and produce its percussive effects.
A poster for "Four Hands," a concert by organists Lee Shin-young and Olivier Latry in Seoul / Courtesy of Lotte Foundation for Arts
Homecoming
Lee's homecoming carries deep weight.
After a quarter-century abroad, Lee calls Korea her “base camp,” where even a spoonful of gochujang can restore her courage.
“It already felt as if my country were warmly embracing me with open arms,” Lee said, recalling the anticipation she felt as a student boarding flights home, adding that sharing the stage with her husband makes this homecoming “beyond words.”
“Being in Korea, Shin-young’s country, makes it indeed more special,” Latry said.
The couple sees Korea’s organ scene as vibrant and internationally promising but constrained by too few pipe organs.
Latry points to the “vitality of the Korean organ school,” citing Korean students who have won international competitions, while Lee says Korea’s lack of a European-style organ culture may paradoxically foster a more open stage for diverse players and repertoire.
Both stress the need for more pipe organs in concert halls. “It is important that each concert hall gets an organ,” Latry said, while Lee warns that electronic organs cannot replicate the sonic depth and resonance of the real instrument.