Chung, Kyung Wha

views updated May 21 2018

Kyung Wha Chung

Violinist

Fluid, elegant, and lyric, violinist Kyung Wha Chung was the first Western-style classical virtuoso to emerge from Korea. An engaging performer who challenges listeners to share her perceptive interpretations, she has performed under the leading conductors of the era. Publication of her work creates excitement among collectors, especially Koreans, who look on Chung as a national icon.

Born Chung Kyung Wha on March 26, 1948, in Seoul, Korea, Chung is the daughter of music lovers Won Sook Lee and Chun Chai. Through exposure to a variety of songs, concerts, and symphonies at home, she shared a love of music with her brothers and sisters. Her younger sister Myung Wha took up the cello; brother Myung Whun studied piano and became a world-class conductor. At her mother’s urging, Chung chose the violin and observed that its tonal range and timbre resembled the human voice. By 1952, she was performing with orchestras and made her first national tour at the age of 12.

In the early 1960s, to gain more opportunities in music education for their children, the family moved to the United States. At age 13, Chung received a seven-year scholarship. She began studying privately with Ivan Galamian at the Juilliard School of Music where her sister Myung Wha also enrolled. The school surprised Chung. Later, she remarked, “I was shocked by the high standard of the music there, and my only goal was to reach that high level,” she told Asia Week. She adored Galamian but realized his bias toward female artists. She commented to American Record Guide after his death, “[He] loved me deeply, but that did not change how he felt about female students. He had already been let down by a number of girl prodigies who abandoned their professional goals in their teens, or who had run off and got married.”

At the age of 19, Chung won first prize in the Leventritt Competition, an honor she shared with Itzhak Perlman. Chung made her European debut in 1970 at London’s Royal Festival Hall playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto with conductor André Previn and the London Symphony. Her intensity, delicacy, and dramatic stage presence brought invitations for three more London concerts and a televised performance. Of the mounting list of successes, she confided modestly to Thor Eckert, Jr. of the Christian Science Monitor, “My career was one miracle after another.”

Concertgoers recognized Chung’s ability to sink into a performance, drawing out a spirit and fire with deft strokes of the bow. Absorbed in hypnotic phrasing, she ranged from gentle to tempestuous. After her impeccable rendering of Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto at the Champs Elysee Theater in Paris for the seventieth birthday of composer Pierre Boulez, listeners demanded eight curtain calls. Kyung Soo Won, conductor of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, marveled at the

For the Record…

Born Chung Kyung Wha on March 26, 1948, in Seoul, Korea. Education: Studied with Ivan Galamian at the Juilliard School of Music.

Debuted in London, England, with André Previn and the London Symphony, 1970; recorded best-selling album Con Amore, 1987; recorded Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, 1988; named honorary ambassador of the United Nations Drug Control Program, 1992; recorded Brahms’ violin sonatas with pianist Peter Frankl, 1997; recorded Souvenirs, 1999; recorded Celibidache Conducts Strauss and Respighi Violin Sonatas, 2000.

Awards: First Prize, Leventritt Competition, 1967; Medal of Civil Merit from the South Korean government, 1972; Gramophone Award for Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2, 1988; Gramophone Award for Celibidache Conducts Strauss and Respighi Violin Sonatas, 2000.

Addresses: Record company —Angel/EMI Records, 304 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010, phone: (212) 253-3200, fax: (212) 253-3011, website: http://www.emiclassics.com.

uniqueness of her tone and technique in Asia Week: “These days, young musicians all play the same, but she is markedly different from all the others.”

Chung’s mastery of the Western classical canon quickly brought invitations from symphonies in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, Anchorage, Vancouver, Berlin, Vienna, Israel, Helsinki, Munich, Hong Kong, and Paris. She also toured the United States, Europe, and Japan. For Angel/EMI, London/Decca, RCA, and Deutsche Grammophon, has she recorded a broad span of violin solos, including Bartok, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Vivaldi, and Tchaikovsky. In 1972, a proud homeland awarded her the Medal of Civil Merit from the South Korean government.

Chung let music dominate her life until age 36, when she disobeyed the injunctions of Galamian, her first mentor. After she married a British businessman in 1984 and bore two sons, Frederick and Eugene, she pared her performance schedule by 50 percent. With the firstborn, she snuggled him into a basket and placed it close to the recital podium. Staying close to family enabled her to develop bilingualism in her sons and take them on tour and on visits to Korea. Of the change in her life, she affirmed her duties to home: “As a mother, your priorities change. The children come first.” The reward for her fans was a new-found soul-fulness, a product of judgment and maturity that rid her of attempts to please everyone but herself.

In 1988, domestication did not inhibit Chung from recording Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the first album to win her an award from Gramophone magazine. In 1997, she recorded Brahms’ violin sonatas with pianist Peter Frankl and followed in 1999 with the crowd-pleasing Souvenirs, an anthology of short pieces performed with Lithuanian pianist Itamar Golan. She patterned the serene program after her best-selling album Con Amore, which sold over 100,000 after its release in 1987, making it a Korean classic. In 2000, she received a second Gramophone Award for Celibidache Conducts Strauss and Respighi Violin Sonatas, performed with Krystian Zimerman.

Categorized with string masters Midori and Yo-Yo Ma, Chung has helped bridge the chasm that once isolated the Asian arts from the West. To maintain ties with her siblings and homeland, she has performed for Korean audiences with the Chung Trio, comprised of herself, London-based Myung Wha, cello instructor at Korea’s National School of Music, and pianist Myung Whun, the artistic director of the Paris Bastille Opera House. The chamber ensemble recorded a critically acclaimed performance of Beethoven’s Piano Trios Op. 11 and 97 and, in 1997, toured Seoul, Kwangju, Inchon, Taegu, Chinju, and Pusan. To rapt audiences, she and her sister paired violin with cello for Mendelssohn’s Violin Sonata in F major and Schumann’s Violin Sonata No.1 in A major. The trio wowed listeners with a grand finale, the Brahms Piano Trio No. 2 in C major.

In March of 2001, Los Angeles Times arts critic Daniel Cariaga summed up the quintessence of Chung’s technique and musicality in one word—satisfying. Her intent is to nurture artistic development in Korea’s young musicians. In limited spare time, Chung gardens and gives violin lessons. Since June of 1992, she and her musical brother and sister have served as honorary ambassadors of the United Nations Drug Control Program. To raise money for the cause, they have performed recitals in Chicago, New York, Rome, and Seoul. Chung currently lives in Manhattan, New York, and southern England, but was quoted by Asia Week as saying, “I’m Korean, and there’s nothing that will change that.”

Selected discography

Con Amore, EMI, 1987.

Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 and Rhapsodies 1 and 2, EMI, 1988.

Franck: Sonata for Violin and Piano/Debussy: Sonatas/Ravel: Introduction and Allegro, UNI/London Classics, 1988.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Introduction and Rondo capriccioso in A, Polygram, 1992.

Beethoven/Bruch, EMI, 1992.

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto Nos.1-3/Violin Concerto, UNI/Phillips, 1997.

Beethoven Triple Concerto, Deutsche Grammophon, 1997.

Bruch: Violin Concerto/Scottish Fantasia, Polygram, 1997.

Brahms’ Violin Sonatas 1-3, EMI, 1998.

Souvenirs: A Collection of Favourite Violin Pieces, EMI, 1999.

Kyung Wha Chung Performs Bruch: Concerto for violin in G, UNI/Penguin Classics, 1999.

Celibidache Conducts Strauss and Respighi Violin Sonatas, Deutsche Grammophon, 2000.

Sources

Books

The Complete Marquis Who’s Who, Marquis Who’s Who, 2001.

Periodicals

American Record Guide, October 1982; January-February 1999; March 1, 2000.

Audio, April 1985.

Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1989; December 1, 1992; March 20, 2001.

Christian Science Monitor, May 4, 1989.

Consumers’ Research, June 1982.

Korea Herald, August 16, 1999.

Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2001.

Musical America, November 1990.

New West, March 24, 1980.

New York Times, November 4, 1988; November 24, 1998.

People, November 8, 1982.

Seattle Times, November 11, 1997.

Stereo Review, April 1985.

Online

Biography Resource Center, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (June 28, 2001).

“Chung Kyung Wha,” Asia Week, http://168.131.50.85/class/col_eng/young/chung.html (June 28, 2001).

“Chung Kyung Wha,” Korean Overseas Information Service, http://www.natural.cau.ac.kr/PChem/JOO/chungkw.html (June 28, 2001).

“Chung Kyung Wha,” Melting Pot, http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/slovakia/583/mus3.htm (June 28, 2001).

“Kyung-Wha Chung,” EMI Classics, http://www.emiclassics.com/artists/biogs/chung.html (June 28, 2001).

—Mary Ellen Snodgrass

Contemporary Musicians Snodgrass, Mary

Kyung Wha Chung

views updated May 11 2018

Kyung Wha Chung

Kyung Wha Chung (born 1948) led the way for Korean musicians to excel in the western world. Arriving as a child to study in New York City, Chung made the study of the violin her life's work.

On March 26, 1948, Kyung Wha Chung was born in Seoul, Korea, to Won Sook Lee and Chun Chai. She grew up in a family with eight siblings, all of whom had early training in music. They all began with piano lessons. "Both my parents were music lovers," stated Chung on the Asia Week website. "Music was part of our education, and there was always music-making at home." A friend of her father gave her a violin to play at the young age of six. She immediately found she could express herself with the instrument. "The violin," she noted in Asia Week, "is very close to the human voice." Soon she was playing in a trio with her sister Myung Wha, who was getting proficient on cello, and brother Myung Whun, who stuck with the piano.

Talented Child Musician Headed to New York City

Her older sister, Myung So, was very skilled on the flute and went to America to study at Juilliard in New York City. In 1961, Chung followed and shared an apartment with her sister. Chung also began studying at Juilliard with the well-known Ivan Galamian. Living in New York City, struggling to learn a new language and to live away from home and family in Korea, was difficult. "To put it mildly, I started a whole new life," Chung told the Shanghai Star. "From that time on, my commitment to music was the beacon that showed the way for me." Galamian was extremely firm with her about understanding that she would have a career as a concert violinist and would not have time to have a family. He said that it was unacceptable for a woman to have both. "Mr. Galamian loved me deeply," said Chung, according to the January/February 1999 issue of the American Record Guide, "but that did not change how he felt about female students. He had already been let down by a number of girl prodigies who abandoned their professional goals in their teens, or who had run off and got married." At each lesson, he would remind her that she was not to get married and have children. She would always respond that it was her intention to become a concert violinist. Later, she would tell Asia Week, "I was shocked by the high standard of the music there, and my only goal was to reach that high level."

In 1967, at age 19, she gained a great deal of attention when she won the 25th international Leventritt Competition at Carnegie Hall in New York City, sharing first prize with Pinchas Zukerman. This brought her engagements throughout the United States and Europe. This further led to an opportunity that served as a springboard to her career. She got her London debut by replacing Itzhak Perlman in the Tchaikovsky Concerto with André Previn and the London Symphony. "Sometimes one person's mischance becomes another person's chance," Chung is quoted as stating on the Amazon.com website. "After winning the Leventritt, I began to perform in America and Europe. But it was the London debut that really launched my international career. It was very successful, though at first everything seemed to be against me: I had stepped in at the last moment, and there was so much confusion that I hardly had any rehearsal, but as a result the musicians were all the more concentrated at the performance. The communication with the audience was very strong, so the event was a wonderful experience. The concert was a benefit and not supposed to be reviewed, but the critic with the Financial Times wrote one of the best reviews I have ever received in my life. It was really quite embarrassing—he simply said I was better than everybody else, mentioning a lot of names. I just ignored it, but it was a gold mine for the managers, and I got engagements all over Europe. I always feel very strange when I have to cancel a concert, but then I think, Maybe this will give a young artist the chance of a lifetime." She further stated, "For a young player, replacing another artist can be the first stepping stone to a career. I got my London debut by replacing Perlman in the Tchaikovsky Concerto with André Previn and the London Symphony. Shortly afterward, Renata Tebaldi canceled a recording session and London Records asked me to record the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos instead. My recording career started when they offered me an exclusive contract. And I got my German debut because Lorin Maazel engaged me for his Berlin Festival when Boris Christoff pulled out."

Her success was so great that she was immediately booked for three more London concerts, a tour of Japan, and a television appearance. Engagements with the London Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, and Cleveland Orchestra followed, firmly establishing her international career. Chung quickly gained recognition throughout the world as a high caliber performer. She was appearing with all of the major orchestras and conductors throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East. Asia Week contends that she was a leader in showing that Asians could master the western classical tradition, quoting Kyung Soo Won, the conductor of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra as saying, "Until she became a world-class violinist, it was only remotely possible for a Korean to achieve that kind of success. It was like a dream in the clouds. But she showed it was possible." In 1972, the South Korean government awarded her with their highest honor by presenting her with the Medal of Civil Merit. Kyung Soo Won stated in Asia Week that she has a skill and style all her own by saying, "Her tone and technique are unique. These days, young musicians all play the same, but she is markedly different from all the others."

Chung Changed the Rules

In 1981, her long-time instructor, Galamian, to whom she had consistently promised that she would never marry, passed away. A few years later, in 1984, when she was 35, Chung broke her promise and got married to a British businessman. When her first son, Frederick, was born, she worked hard to keep at least part of her promise to Galamian, by being determined to not let motherhood affect her work, maintaining the same schedule and taking young Frederick along with her in a basket everywhere. However, when her second son, Eugene, was born, she found that Galamian had been right and that she could no longer keep up. She cut back on her performance schedule, reducing it from 120 performances each season down to 60. "For me, because motherhood came rather late, it was the most incredible experience to have my children, so they became my first priority, and I wanted to be with them," Chung stated. "As far as music and performing are concerned, I tried to narrow it down to a certain kind of continuous project—recording—so I did concerts that were related to preparing for the recordings," she told American Record Guide in the January/February 1999 edition.

In 1988, she signed a contract to record exclusively with EMI Classics. "Recordings are so personal for me," she said to the Rocky Mountain News. "Nothing is ever permanent in an interpretation—but that's not the case with a record. You have to leave something of your soul on that compact disc. The problem is, your soul is not perfect, so a recording never will be." However, recording obviously agreed with her as she won a Gramophone Award for the recording of the "Bartók Violin Concerto No. 2" and the two rhapsodies with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle. She also began recording more with her brother and sister, and they called themselves the Chung Trio. Her brother, Myung Whun Chung, was a winner of the 1974 Tchaikovsky Piano competition and has been music director of the Paris Opera and head of the Orchesstra of the Academia Santa Cecilia in Rome. Her sister, Myung Wha, plays the cello and has won the Geneva International Competition. In 1994, they released Beethoven's "Piano Trios Op. 11 and 97" which received great critical acclaim. The trio is well known in Korea, but also widely recognized throughout the world. She is quoted on Amazon.com as saying, "We have played together all our lives." The Chung Trio made a number of recordings including a performance of the Beethoven Triple Concerto with the Philharmonic Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon in the 1995-1996 season.

When Chung did tour, she would take her children with her when they were not in school. She also took them to Korea several times to experience the culture. Both the children learned to speak Korean. "That was important for me," Chung told Asia Week. Both children have also studied music extensively. Chung is considered an icon on Korea. She considers herself Korean, although she only lived there for a small percentage of her life, now living in southern England and New York City. "I'm Korean, and there's nothing that will change that," she told Asia Week.

In 2000, she won another Gramophone Award for her recording of the Strauss and Respighi Violin Sonatas with Krystian Zimmerman.

Chung Returned to Full Concert Schedule

As her children grew older, Chung began to expand her performing schedule once again, but she did not slow down on her recordings. In February of 2001, her recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, played with the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, was released. Sensible Sound called her a "magnificent violinist" and stated, "Chung's interpretation is best described as elegant. Her phrasing is elegant, her tempos are elegant, her command of nuance is elegant." Later that year, in November, she released the recording of "Symphony No. 5; Brahms: Violin Concerto" with Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic. "Kyung Wha Chung can be a firebrand violinist, but here she's very much the aristocrat. She supplies gleaming tone and rhythmic acuity, but also delicacy and tenderness. Her hushed, high flickerings in the Joachim cadenza are breathtaking," stated the Dallas Morning News.

Even as an experienced concert violinist and recording artist, Chung sometimes will still get nervous. "Funnily enough, even after having been on all the major stages of the world, it took me a long time to get rid of those feelings of anxiety when I performed in New York. Every time I walked out in Carnegie Hall, I felt as though I were 19, about to play for the Leventritt Competition on that stage. I went to Carnegie Hall last December, to perform the Beethoven Concerto, and my children were sitting there with a big smile. I suddenly thought this is simply wonderful!" she told American Record Guide.

Chung continues to practice for several hours every day. When she has time, she enjoys gardening and teaching students. Chung remains one of the most sought-after international violin players.