Pianist Hai-Kyung Suh has won acclaim on four continents for her signature playing style, deeply rooted in the Russian Romantic tradition.  Like few other artists before the public today, her combination of singing tone, rich color palette, and supreme virtuosity recalls the great pianists of yesteryear from Rachmaninoff and Hofmann to Cherkassky and Bolet, causing critics like the one for the Asahi Shinbun of Tokyo to exclaim over "a passionate musicality and dramatic expressiveness rarely seen."  In that same grand tradition, her profound understanding of musical structure gives her performances a particularly compelling quality; reviewing Ms. Suh’s New York recital debut, Tim Page in the New York Times described a "propulsive and exciting performance, built block by block with the structural command of a musical architect."
Through her training with the renowned pedagogues Nadia Reisenberg and Sascha Gorodnitzki, Hai-Kyung Suh achieved exceptional insight into the great works of the Russian repertoire.  The Times of London wrote of her performance of Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra: "Her obvious deep involvement with the work infuses it with a freshness and electric energy which has earned her high praise."  The same work, performed in Berlin with conductor Franz Welser-Möst, brought admiration for her “hair-raising virtuosity” from Der Tagesspiegel, which continued, "Her mastery of the concerto brought shouts of bravo from the admiring audience, and excited, tumultuous applause."  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has called her “a genuinely Romantic fire-breather” at the piano.  She has made acclaimed recordings of the complete piano concertos of Tchaikovsky, and is the first woman pianist to record all five of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra: four concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.