Sungha Jung: Stringing Stories Once More This August

 What Sungha Jung’s throngs of Filipino admirers can easily agree on is that, well, he should perform in these shores again. The Korean guitar wunderkind was here in June of last year to give music fans, young and old alike, a taste of his six-string awesomeness. Serious music aficionados were in visible awe of the teenager’s lightning-fast fretwork, while more casual supporters were treated to a well-balanced repertoire of original pieces and rearrangements of popular tunes, among them Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” Maroon 5’s “Payphone,” Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” and the Eraserheads’ “Ang Huling El Bimbo,” which particularly floored the local audiences. On the more virtuoso side of things, meanwhile, Sungha churned out performances of the Super Mario Brothers theme, as well as JerryC’s “Canon Rock,” a rock arrangement of Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.” Original cuts from his discography—2010’s Perfect Blue, 2011’s Irony, 2012’s The Duets, 2013’s Paint It Acoustic, and this year’s Monologue—are no slouches either, and they were as well-received in the shows as their revived counterparts. The seventeen-year-old has been called many things in the press and elsewhere, among them the catch-all “guitar prodigy” tag, and, also, “the August Rush of Korea,” an allusion to a film depicting an archetype that’s close to home: that of a boy genius nursing unnamed heartaches. Well, it would thrill people to know that Sungha Jung will be playing Cebu and Manila once more, on August 15 (at the J. Center Mall) and 17 (at the Samsung Hall, SM Aura), respectively. The show is being mounted yet again by the same producer as last year’s: the online music portal Pinoytuner. Sungha Jung is on a creative and technical peak that’s far from over, and it would be wise to catch him in August, whether you saw him last year or not. He’s got more aces up his sleeve.

- PINOYTUNER

For tickets contact SM Tickets here