As one of South Korea’s brightest young pianists, Yeol Eum Son is aware how the excitement surrounding rising talent can overshadow great pianists of the past. As she explains to Apple Music Classical, her playlist showcases “old-timers—those pianists who I admired and adored the most during my late teenage years and into my early twenties. I believe they all became at least one part of the formative influences of my own identity as a pianist.” Yeol Eum’s own piano teacher encouraged her to listen to past greats such as Lazar Berman. “He was an example of ‘ideal sound’”, she explains; you can hear this in the organ-like sonorities of his recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Study No. 11. Or, for more Liszt, there’s Benno Moiseiwitsch, who, Yeol Eum says, “always makes me feel so amazingly lighthearted with his featherlike fingerworks”. Sometimes it’s not so much about tone as how the music is expressed in a pianist’s performance. Two pianists whose playing, Yeol Eum says, “completely changed my ideas about piano playing”, are the Frenchman Alfred Cortot, and the Odessa-born American pianist Shura Cherkassky. “Ever since I encountered Cortot’s Chopin Ballade, I don’t think I was the same musician as before. What an authority this playing conveys! And Cherkassky’s Kreisleriana, the way he ‘speaks’ through the piano is out of this world.” There are other pianists whose playing she says “still makes my heart pound”. Two favourites are Hungarian French György Cziffra, who you can hear playing “Valse triste” composed by fellow Hungarian Franz von Vecsey. Yeol Eum also has a special word for the relatively underappreciated Soviet pianist, Lev Oborin, the first winner of the International Chopin Competition: “Oborin’s almost anti-sentimental Tchaikovsky has such profound sadness which you rarely find these days.”