'A song for spring'

Marianne Bylund, first secretary and head of Administration and Consular Affairs at the Embassy of Sweden, second from right, and her husband Tommy Bylund look at the brochure for the Spring Music Concert hosted by The Korea Times at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in Seoul, Thursday. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

Korea Times annual concert celebrates 66th anniversary

By Yun Suh-young

The Korea Times concert, celebrating the 66th anniversary of the newspaper, ended with a standing ovation, Thursday, at the Grand Theater of the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in Seoul.

Over 1,700 guests including the newspaper’s readers, government officials, diplomats, business leaders and cultural figures attended the annual spring musical event.

A variety of genres of music delighted the audience — from classical and jazz to popera (pop and opera) — performed by some of Korea’s top musical talents, including soprano Kang Hye-jung, baritone Seo Jung-hack, tenor Choe Bo-han, chanson singer Monsieur Ko, jazz artist Woong San, popera singer Hanarin and singer Lee Dong-won, led by the Mostly Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Park Sang-hyun.

This year’s concert was particularly special because it featured, for the first time, songs that were composed based on poems by Korea’s well-known poet Jeong Ho-seung. The featured songs were “An Unposted Letter” sung by Ko and “The Parting Song” sung by Lee.

Jeong’s poems are currently regularly being published in The Korea Times, translated by Brother Anthony and Susan Hwang.

Jeong, 66, who was also present said he was delighted to have the songs featured at the concert.

“I think when melody is coated over a poem, it carries a different ambience and a stronger power of dissemination,” said Jeong.

“Within a poem is a song, and within a song lies a poem. The poem and song are one; they’re just expressed in different ways. When a poem becomes a song, it resonates bigger because a melody has the power to reach a wider audience than a compilation of words.”

Jeong was also pleased that his poems were being translated by Brother Anthony, who he claimed was “the best in the country.”

“One of the roles of poems is to console people’s pain in life: An Unposted Letter sung previously by Kim Kwang-seok is the last song he left us before he died. It talks about the pain and hope of his times.”

Jeong said he had the most number of poems written into songs among the poets in this country.

“There are around 60 songs produced based on my poems. The Parting Song which is pop, was my first poem to be made into a song. It was also singer Lee Dong-won’s first attempt to turn a poem into a song. It caused a sensation in the 1980s. A million albums were sold at the time.”

Jeong expressed the hope that many Korean poems will be translated into English for the whole world to read them. “The most powerful language in the world currently is English, so I hope our poems will be translated into English more. The publication of my poems in The Korea Times is one of the big steps in globalizing our poems,” he said.

Conductor Park Sang-hyun who took the helm of the Mostly Philharmonic Orchestra said this year’s concert was represented by the two songs that were based on Jeong’s works.

“We chose to list the two songs in our playlist because The Korea Times is currently publishing Jeong’s poems. He is a great poet of the time and his poems are widely made into songs so we chose the two most popular ones to perform,” Park said.

“It is not too much to say that the concert is dedicated to poet Jeong as he was invited to attend the concert.”

Foreign dignitaries who attended the event said they appreciated the effort of The Korea Times to hold cultural events to communicate with foreigners.

“I really enjoyed the concert. It’s a fruitful event for the foreign diplomatic community to be involved and to share Korean culture through music,” said Ramzi Teymurov, ambassador of the Republic of Azerbaijan who attended concert for the first time.

For Mohamed Ali Nafti, ambassador of the Republic of Tunisia, it was his second time to attend the concert.

“What I liked the most was the wonderful interpretation of the songs such as We are the World and Parla Piu Piano, which is a song from the movie The Godfather. It gives foreigners the impression that there’s Korean musical fun and I love that,” said the ambassador. “We have great respect for such cultural events in Korea. We also have opera in Tunisia and it’s more or less similar. The artists were excellent by the way.”