SINGING FROM THE HEART

For Korean violinist Bomsori Kim, the past year has been one of her busiest yet, with numerous live and streamed performances and her first solo recording for Deutsche Grammophon. As she takes her next steps on the road to international renown, she shares her guiding principles with Andrew Mellor

Bomsori Kim performs with the NFM Wrocɫaw Philharmonic conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero for streamed music service DG Stage in September 2020

KAROL SOKOŁOWSKI/ NFM

Bomsori Kim was given her distinctive name by her grandfather. Unusual in her native Korea, Bomsori translates literally as ‘sound of spring’. ‘I was actually born in winter, not spring,’ the violinist explains,but as winter is cold and difficult, he wanted me  to bring some nice spring news into the world.’ As I talk to Kim after the longest of winters, on a sunny 1 April, it’s easy to relate to her grandfather’s thinking.

She arrived at the Juilliard School as a postgraduate in 2014 following studies at Seoul National University. Since then her rise has been quick, and with a multi-album deal from prestigious label Deutsche Grammophon signed early in 2021, it is unlikely to be temporary. A busy summer includes a residency at the Rheingau Music Festival near Frankfurt that will encompass all five Mozart concertos with Camerata Salzburg, the Tchaikovsky Concerto with Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and chamber music with cellist Maximilian Hornung and pianist Fabian Müller.

With her all the way will be the 1774 Guadagnini that she has played since 2013, on loan from the Kumho Asiana Cultural Foundation. Speaking on Zoom from Seoul, on a rare trip home to South Korea to appear at  the Tongyeong International Music Festival, Kim clutches the I LEARN NEW PIECES’ pristine-looking instrument lovingly to her chest and gently strums its strings throughout our conversation. ‘The fascinating thing about a fine instrument is its hidden history – the things we don’t know about because they weren’t written down or recorded,’ she says. ‘It has history in its voice and I always find new colours or new stories when I learn new pieces.’

Performing with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra in February 2020

WARSAW PHILHARMONIC

The Guadagnini reacted particularly well to Szymanowski’s First Concerto, Kim reports, producing a sound she had never heard from it before. ‘In the lower register, especially, it has a really rich, dark sound and this special elegance. It is not the loudest instrument, but it has colours and character that I have not come across in other Guadagninis – and I have played lots of them. I love the warmer, darker side it has, especially in a piece like the Szymanowski which is all about atmosphere, all about colour.’

The instrument accompanied her across the Pacific Ocean in 2014 to enrol at Juilliard, where her principal teachers were Sylvia Rosenberg and Ronald Copes. ‘It was a confusing time,’ Kim admits. ‘I had some belief in myself bu  had never lived alone and was not really ready for the language –I actually had a hard time understanding what people wanted me to do. The mentality was so different from what I was used to in Korea. I was able to interact with all the teachers, including chamber music coaches, and they all seemed to be saying different things about the same pieces – do this, do that. I eventually realised that they wanted me to find my own way, and that I had to try it, feel it and experience it on stage. That is how I got through those times.’

‘MY GUADAGNINI HAS HISTORY IN ITS VOICE AND I ALWAYS FIND NEW COLOURS OR NEW STORIES WHEN

Rosenberg, Kim confirms, is as strict as her reputation suggests. ‘It is not acceptable to her if you don’t know every one of the score’s indications.’ That approach appears to have seeped into the young Korean’s musical consciousness. Leaning into the camera on our Zoom call, with a steely gaze but a frequent laugh, she refers again and again to ‘text and context’ – the Rosenbergderived theory that you can’t understand one without the other, that ‘loving eyes will find more’ in the detail of the score, and that interpretation is built not only on instincts and feeling but on extreme familiarity with the score itself.

That lesson has stood Kim in good stead in the first stages of a major international career, which has invariably involved quickly forming new relationships with orchestras, conductors and chamber partners. ‘I have started to enjoy the process,’

‘I WANTED TO BE A SINGER VERY MUCH BUT REALISED THERE WAS A LIMIT TO MY ABILITIES. THAT’S WHY I CHOSE TO PLAY A HIGH-VOICED INSTRUMENT, SO I COULD SING THROUGH THAT’

On stage with the Festival Orchestra, conducted by Christian Vásquez, at the Tongyeong International Music Festival, South Korea, in March 2021

SIHOON KIM

Kim says of turning up in a new city to work with a new group of colleagues for a week. ‘It’s always refreshing to be exposed to new ideas, that two people can interpret things so differently.

There are more questions I’m not afraid to ask now, and I am more open to listening to opinions, to seeing if it works for me and if I can apply it to my own music making. Anyway, answers in music are never a hundred per cent clear; things are always open-ended.’

It was a string of prizes at numerous international competitions that brought Kim to prominence in the mid- 2010s, including a shared second prize in the violin category at the 2013 ARD International Music Competition in Munich (first prize was not awarded that year) and eleven prizes at the 2016 International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition.

What she learnt above all from the competition circuit was stamina. ‘You’re there for a month, you’re putting all your efforts into each round. It was helpful for me to learn about that strength, in preparation for becoming a professional concert violinist.’

Is the professional life a little easier than endless competitions? ‘No, it’s worse. It’s really a lot worse!’ In what sense? ‘Because there’s all the travelling and all the stress, and the people you meet don’t know what situation you are in. At least in a competition, people know you’re in a competition: that you’re in the third round or fourth round. When you appear somewhere to give a concert, they don’t know where you’ve been the week before. You are there just once, and maybe you will never be invited back, so you have to give your best all the time – to everybody.’

Still, Kim professes to being ready for another thirty years of the life of a concert violinist and will be ‘ready to run’ when activities return to something like normal after the pandemic. The year 2020 did not convince her (as it did many of her colleagues) to accept a slower pace of life. It was a busy time for her by any standards. She participated in live broadcasts and streams, appeared in person at European and Asian festivals, took part in spotlight sessions for Deutsche Grammophon’s DG Stage and recorded her first solo album for the label in Poland (two more will be recorded before the year is out). European activities are made easier by her current base in Berlin.

The recording celebrates the violin in music for opera and ballet, with Wieniawski’s Fantaisie brillante on Themes from Gounod’s Faust and Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie headlining alongside the ‘Méditation’ from Massenet’s Thaïs, Saint-Saëns’s Introduction et rondo capriccioso and Michael Rot’s specially commissioned arrangements, which include the pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. The album unmistakably channels the spirit of Oistrakh and Heifetz in its presenting of songs on the violin, both in terms of practicalities and playing style. ‘I can really sing through this instrument,’ she says of her Guadagnini.

Kim sang as a child. ‘I wanted to be a singer very much but realised there was a limit to my abilities, so I stopped. That’s why I chose to play a high-voiced instrument, so I could sing through that.’ During her time at Juilliard, she was at the Metropolitan Opera ‘all the time’. Also on the record are Rot’s arrangements of the aria ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’ from Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson et Dalila and ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (Kim also did ballet as a child). ‘Michael did such an amazing job, turning these works into real violin pieces, even including cadenzas,’ Kim says. ‘They match the style of the Waxman and the Wieniawski perfectly, and the concept.’

Performing in the final of the 2016 Wieniawski Competition with the Tadeusz Szeligowski Poznań Philharmonic under the baton of Marek Pijarowski

WIENIAWSKI PHOTOS RR STUDIO, ARCHIVES OF MUSICAL SOCIETY OF H. WIENIAWSKI, POZNAN

Wieniawski is something of a speciality for Kim. She won hearts at the Wieniawski competition in 2016, and her first solo recording, released the following year on Warner Classics, headlined with his Violin Concerto no.2. ‘He has been my favourite composer for a long time, but I always used to have a fear of playing his pieces because he was such a great violinist himself. I always thought, “I am just not brilliant enough for this,”’ she explains. Time passed and brought with it a new appreciation of Wieniawski – and the approachable notion that his art runs deeper than that of the virtuoso showman. ‘He didn’t really want to show off, actually. It’s deeper than that. His music is really about singing, and from the heart. Now I understand him better I don’t have to fear playing him so much.’

The process of recording has led Kim to listen to herself more critically. ‘This is my third album, and the recording process has actually changed my entire concept of technique because I hear so much and so closely with headphones during editing. You don’t always remember how things sound on stage, but listening back to recordings has given me so many new ideas, different concepts of playing and bowing. You have different standards when you hear everything.’

‘KOGAN, HEIFETZ AND MILSTEIN ALL SANG THROUGH THEIR INSTRUMENTS. THEY ARE CERTAINLY MY IDOLS AND I WANT TO PRODUCE THAT KIND OF SOUND FROM MY VIOLIN AS WELL’

Kim doesn’t just like a challenge, she professes to being ‘addicted’ to pushing herself. She tackled Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto no.1 for the first time during the 2016 Montreal International Music Competition, preparing her muscles by playing the entire piece four times in a row, end to end, with a willing pianist. When she takes on all five Mozart concertos with Camerata Salzburg across two days in July, she will be playing the middle three in public for the first time.

She is currently learning Nielsen’s long and testing Violin Concerto in preparation for a performance with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Fabio Luisi at the DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen this October. ‘I’m still in the process of digesting it,’ she says, ‘because it’s very exotic and special, with this unusual combination of the intellectual and the virtuosic. It is actually fascinating to me that such a piece as this even exists in the violin repertoire, and I’m now convinced it’s a very, very great piece.’

Backstage at the 2016 Wieniawski Competition

RECORDING PHOTO GREGOR KOTOW

Other repertoire on her horizon includes the Paderewski Violin Sonata, in collaboration with her regular pianist Rafał Blechacz, and the lesser-known second concertos of Bruch and Szymanowski.

In August, at the Lutherkirche, Wiesbaden, as part of the Rheingau festival (which counts her as one of its most treasured resident guests), she will join the British chamber choir Tenebrae for performances of Bach’s Partita in D minor braided with a selection of his chorales. ‘The choir will be split into four groups and I will be in the middle. It will be an amazing experience.’

It seems appropriate that the choir will be joined by a violinist who originally wanted to be a singer – not least as her conversation returns time and again to the subject of singing. ‘Kogan, Heifetz and Milstein all sang through their instruments,’ Kim says. ‘You understand immediately what they’re saying, without any prior knowledge or background. It’s actually too big to describe what it is they do. But they are certainly my idols and I want to produce that kind of sound from my violin as well.’ Her full, sinewy tone, the touch of sweetness she brings across all registers, and the sure-footed but ardent legato she finds everywhere on her new recording recall those players without imitating them.

Kim records her new album in Wrocɫaw, Poland for DG in December 2020

It was Kim’s compatriot Kyung Wha Chung who set her on the path to the violin. When Chung visited Kim’s home town of Daegu, South Korea, her musical parents took her along to the concert. ‘I just cried at that moment. My parents were worried that I was sick or something. But I was not able to control my emotions on hearing this sound, because it went so very directly to my heart.’ Any violinist could do worse than aim to do the same for their audience. For Kim, it appears to be a guiding principle.

WIN BOMSORI KIM’S ‘VIOLIN ON STAGE’ ALBUM

Kim’s recording celebrating the violin in music for opera and ballet is released on Deutsche Grammophon on 18 June. To win one of ten copies, submit your details at bit.ly/3aqEn70

Closing date 31 July 2021