
Yeol Eum is very much a natural concert pianist. She possesses the rare combination of technical skill, musicality, and the love of performance, of being in the moment. When she is at her best, her playing sounds "fresh" or spontaneous but at the same time completely under control. Her performances rarely spill over the structural framework of the music she is playing; she is more than the typical barn-storming whirlwind pianist. Even when she is milking some melodic line in a piece, she holds the other voices or accompanying parts in her mind simultanesouly. Her preference in repertoire seems to be extroverted music with many interesting ideas working in quick succession (she may get bored easily--I would love to hear her run through the major Beethoven variation sets). Many of the choices in her Cliburn disc and in her Internet videos have a "carnivalesque" quality to them. When she was featured on this Israeli television program, she performed a transcription of the scherzo movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique symphony, a 20th century ragtime reworking of Chopin, and another unidentified piece involving audience participation and whistling with an oom-pah jazz ryhthm in the left hand.
There are very few recordings by Yeol Eum available in the US. Her Cliburn Competition disc contains Haydn's Sonata No. 58, Barber's Sonata for Piano, Debussy's Preludes Book I, and a Godowsky transcription of Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II:

The Haydn Sonata is excellent. The first movement contains crisp fingerwork within a sparse, skeletal variation structure. Yeol Eum seems to relish the change of scenery every six or twelve measures (not sure what the time signature is). The second movement is a halting allegro with some very pianistically effective passages that Yeol Eum digs into with sharp technical precision.
The Barber Sonata is an interesting work in many ways, but ultimately in my opinion a somewhat flat composition. The sonata consists of four rather unconnected movements, which may have been why Yeol Eum chose it. The first movement is a very Scriabin-esque monolith with contrasting themes of crashing, dotted octaves and a mystical two-bar right hand leitmotif interspersed with disjointed and fragmentary dappling in the upper register. Yeol Eum's version is quite dark, emphasizing the drama and intensity of the octave dominant sections and the foreboding of the sections carrying the leitmotif. Some of the polyphony in her version is lost. The short scherzo-like second movement is also weighed down to some degree here, although it could be argued that Yeol Eum's approach tries for a consistent point of view through the work. The third movement--a slowly building adagio with a plodding, almost despondent bass line and several short themes weaving in and out of each other--works fairly well here: the plaintive nature of the movement lends itself to an emotional interpretation. When the drunken lurching of the piece snowballs to a spray of multiple-octave blocked chords, Yeol Eum is not shy about destroying the piano. She is not one to waste a good climax. The final movement is designated a fugue, and remains true to that designation for about a minute and a half before wandering off into increasingly capricious, and increasingly pyrotechnic, textures and modes. At about the 3 1/2 minute mark, it becomes obvious that compositional structure for Yeol Eum is not quite as important as the opportunity to shoot flames out of the back end of the Steinway.
Yeol Eum's Preludes are a tangible, material Debussy. She does not fully commit to impressionism, which may make these performances sound weak to some or more palatable to others. The Godowsky transcription is carousel music, in this instance played with particular broadness of feeling. I would venture to say that this is Yeol Eum's statement piece: there is very little actual music here, just joyful, empty, shameless virtuosity. Up and down, up and down, and up and down again...
For balance, Yeol Eum performed all of Chopin's Op. 25 Etudes at the Rubinstein Competition in 2005 here. These are wonderfully controlled, wonderfully expressive readings that show a very capable serious side to Yeol Eum as a pianist.