Born in Wonju, South Korea in 1986, Yeol Eum Son received her first piano lessons at the age of three-and-a-half. She was among the prize winners at the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians in 1997 and won the Oberlin International Piano Competition two years later. Son studied at Korea National University of Arts and continued her training with Arie Vardi at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover.

Son attracted international attention when she secured second prize and the Best Chamber Music Performance at the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition. She won the Silver Medal at the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition and received the competition’s prizes for Best Chamber Concerto Performance and Best Performance of the Commissioned Work.

Over the past decade, Son has achieved global acclaim for her interpretations of Mozart’s piano concertos. Poetic elegance, an innate feeling for expressive nuance and the power to project bold, dramatic contrasts are among the arresting attributes of Son’s pianism. Her refined artistry rises from breathtaking technical control and a profound empathy for the emotional temper of the works within her strikingly wide repertoire. She is driven above all by her natural curiosity to explore a multitude of musical genres and styles and the desire to reveal what she describes as the “pure essence” of everything she performs. Her choice of repertoire, which spans everything from the works of Bach and Mozart to those of Shchedrin and Kapustin, is guided chiefly by the quality and depth of the music.