Song Kang and Lee Jun-young's tvN Music Drama Four Hands Is Already One of 2026's Most Anticipated

Lee Jun-young was pulling 13.6% ratings on JTBC's Chairman Kang, the New Employee just months ago, and Song Kang's Sweet Home season hit number one in ten countries within four days of dropping on Netflix. Both of them are now headlining tvN's upcoming weekend drama Four Hands, which premieres on the 29th at 9:10 p.m., and the weight of that combined track record is hard to ignore.

The show is set inside an elite arts high school where only the most gifted classical musicians earn a place, and it follows three students whose relationships shift under the pressure of talent, rivalry, and admiration. Song Kang plays Kang Bi-o, a pianist accomplished enough to win prestigious competitions but still searching for recognition from his own family. That hunger pushes him toward a kind of perfectionism that leaves little room for anything, or anyone, that doesn't fit his vision of how music should sound.

Lee Jun-young plays Choi Jeong-yo, a pianist with raw, almost reckless talent who grew up in a difficult home environment and never had the stability to let that ability fully develop. His arrival as a transfer student is the event that cracks the drama open: Bi-o starts measuring himself against Jeong-yo almost immediately, while Jeong-yo gives Bi-o's playing an unfiltered critique that clearly lands. Jang Gyu-ri rounds out the central trio as Hong Jae-in, a violist with a finely tuned ear who finds herself unable to be satisfied with her own performances while being genuinely moved by what both pianists do.

How much practice actually went into this

At the online press conference held on the 25th, all three actors were candid about how much of their preparation time went into simply learning to look convincing at their instruments. Song Kang described working through fast-moving classical pieces and said completing the performance scenes was the hardest part of the shoot, though he credited director Park Hyun-seok for guiding him through each one. "The emotion I feel while playing changes scene to scene," he said, "so finding that emotion for each one was its own challenge, but also kind of rewarding."

Lee Jun-young, who is enlisting after this drama wraps, was the most self-deprecating about his musical background. He redirected all the praise to Song Kang, Jang Gyu-ri, and director Park, and then admitted that because he couldn't play piano naturally, he ended up memorizing his pieces in their entirety rather than building real technique. That detail says a lot about the commitment the production required from its cast.

Jang Gyu-ri, who plays a violist, thought her childhood violin training would give her a head start. It did the opposite. "The notation is different, and the spacing for my left hand is different too, so the violin background actually confused me more than it helped," she said. She described learning the viola the way you might learn a dance routine, watching footage of herself, reshooting, adjusting, and going again with her teacher.

The creative team's approach to music as character

Director Park Hyun-seok said that when he first read the script, what struck him was how the classical music setting opened up a story anyone could connect with, not just audiences with a background in the genre. "It doesn't stay inside the specificity of being a pianist," he said. "The emotions at the center are universal."

Writer Shin I-won's path to the material started with a news story about a young pianist winning a major competition. That sent her deep into the world of classical musicians, and she came away convinced that the lives of serious artists carry dramatic weight that doesn't need much embellishment. Her goal was to get that onto the page.

Both Park and Shin treated the music itself as a second lead character rather than backdrop. Shin spent significant effort on song selection, and Park worked to align each musical passage with the emotional state of the scene and the characters moving through it. Even the production design of Bi-o's family home was built around expressing who he is and where he comes from, layering in details meant to reflect a classical artist's sensibility.

For Jang Gyu-ri, Four Hands is another step in a deliberate shift from her idol career toward a sustained acting one, and the role of Hong Jae-in gives her the kind of interiority and emotional range that can define that transition. Writer Shin said all three actors exceeded what she had imagined for the characters on the page, and director Park described a set where the cast were warmly easy with each other before cameras rolled, then fully locked in once they did.

Four Hands premieres on tvN on the 29th at 9:10 p.m.