Euna Park produced an excellent performance in St. John’s Church Hall that showcased the best of Korean music. Mostly this worked in her favour: Park’s talent on the flute is undeniable and when she reached a piece that showcased her ability, such as her range on ‘Cui Bono’, the audience was left in awe by the smooth and excellent delivery of trills and other ornamentation. Her ability to burst from low to high registers in a matter of seconds while retaining full control of her tone was particularly impressive. However, some pieces such as ‘Snail’s Picnic’, which was slow and plodding, never really got her out of her comfort zone. While excellently played, I was left wondering what could have been.
She was also hampered by sub-par technical back-up. Lacking an accompanist, Park was helped by an assistant playing backing tracks on a CD player. There were some skips as some of the tracks would have been played for the wrong songs. An accompanist could really have added an extra edge to the performance that this technology could not. There were other minor technical issues, such as projector that was used for video backing in the last few songs occasionally crashing. Individually these problems were small but overall they detracted from the performance. While Park ended on a high, with a fantastic rendering of both the South Korean national anthem and a folk song that channelled the ‘Skye Boat song’, her flute-playing survived her accoutrements, rather than flourishing from them.
