Kevin Lee Sun, piano & Friends
Look to This Day
Kevin Lee Sun, piano
Hyo-shin Na, composer
Daniel De Togni, composer & shakuhachi
Wallis Lucas, soprano
Daniel De Togni Death Poems (2025) for shakuhachi and piano West Coast Premiere
Hyo-shin Na Rain Study (1999) for piano solo
Hyo-shin Na Autumn Study (2023) for piano solo
Daniel De Togni Songs of Becoming (2024) for soprano and piano West Coast Premiere
Kevin Lee Sun is Assistant Professor of Piano at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. In 2021, he was the sole pianist to be named Finalist of that year’s Berlin Prize for Young Artists in Germany. A native of Sacramento and an alumnus of Stanford and SFCM, Sun returns to California for this concert.
Sun’s program Look to This Day presents music by two living composers—Hyo-shin Na and Daniel De Togni—who will be in attendance. The program is centered around the difficulty, ephemerality, and cherishment of life. “Lord let me suffer much / and then die / Let me walk through silence / and leave nothing behind not even fear.” So begins a Polish poem by Anna Kamieńska that inspired Hyo-shin Na to compose her Autumn Study. Na’s other piece on the program, Rain Study, was inspired by a Korean folk song: “The sun that sets will rise again tomorrow. A life that passes will never return.”
Complementing Hyo-shin Na’s music are the West Coast Premieres of two duo works by Daniel De Togni. Death Poems for shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and piano was inspired by Japanese haikus that act as momento mori. The composer himself will perform on the shakuhachi. For the program’s second half, Pittsburgh-based soprano Wallis Lucas joins Sun for Songs of Becoming, a 30-minute song cycle that sets De Togni’s original text and an ancient Sanskrit poem. Partially in response to his experiences and feelings while living in San Francisco, De Togni’s six songs explore themes of personal growth, dreaming, homelessness, depression, and the preciousness of each day.
