Kyung Wha Chung life and biography

Kyung-wha Chung is a Korean 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.

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 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.

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."
In 2007, she joined Juilliard as a member of the faculty of the school's Music and Pre-College Divisions and in 2011, she received the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts division for her illustrious, 40-year long career as a violinist and an educator.

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.

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