Shakespeare once wrote: “The devil rides upon a fiddlestick.”
- “Clara Kang Plays Mendelssohn” Feb 25 at Thailand Cultural Centre, 7:30pm. This is part of the ‘Great Artists Concert Series 2014’. The Bangkok Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Berlin-based Venezuelan Carlos Izcaray.
- Tickets cost 400-2,000 baht from Thai Ticket Major. Visit www.thaiticketmajor.com.
- Visit www.bangkoksymphony.org or call the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra Foundation on 02-255-6617/8 or 02-254-4954.
- Special Offer for Bangkok Post Readers: A special 25% discount is available for Bangkok Postreaders. Simply cut out two mastheads from the front page and take them to any Thai Ticket Major outlet.
Clara-Jumi Kang had a devil of a time with her own fiddlestick once. She had posed for a cosmetics advertisement, and in Korea, that was not a ver–––y seemly thing to do, so she was criticised for it. But Kang, a veteran and winner of countless violin competitions, simply shrugged that off.
“What’s wrong with doing a little posing? I needed a new fiddlestick for my violin. And the best violin bows cost thousand and thousands of dollars. So I did what I had to do.”
Kang, 26, has been doing what she “has to do” since her childhood. And it has paid off. Four years ago, she won the gold medal at the 8th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis where she also won five additional special prizes. She was the winner of the Sendai International Violin Music Competition. She has been playing around the world.
And on Feb 25 at Thailand Cultural Centre and with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra, she will be performing the Violin Concerto In E-Minor by Felix Mendelssohn, one of the most popular concertos in the entire violin repertory.
Where did Kang get her talent? Obviously, the genes helped. Both of her parents are opera singers. And while she is Korean, she was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1987. The city itself has given its name to one of the important musical periods in history. And in the opera theatre near her birthplace, founded the year of American independence in 1776, home of the finest conductors, where she listened to her parents sing from her earliest age, she got a fast start.
At the age of three, Kang started with piano lessons. But even at that age, she knew that something was missing from her musical life.
“I wanted something with a longer sound than the piano. That was the violin.” And with an inborn perfect pitch (being able to recognise the names of notes just by hearing them), she was well on her way by the ripe old age of four.
That was when she entered Mannheim’s prestigious music school, and within a year she had done everything she could with the violin. She moved to an even more prestigious music school, in Lübeck. But this was only the start for a young girl whose moves were almost as fast as her fingers. After studying with the great teacher Zakhar Bron, she was ready for her debut. Before her age even entered double digits, she had given her debut with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra.
Her parents were obviously astounded by their daughter’s genius, and they knew about one legendary violin teacher. Dorothy DeLay, a girl from America’s Midwest who has taught virtually every virtuoso from Pinchas Zuckerman to Sarah Chang, had heard some recordings of Kang sent by her parents, and she was obviously amazed.
Thus, when Kang was 11 years old, just a few inches higher than her violin, she went across the ocean to Juilliard School. Juilliard took her in with a full scholarship, even though her only languages were Korean and German.
“When we heard her play,” said one teacher, “it was obvious that her major language was violin.”
DeLay took Kang into her prized music studio and gave the girl lessons, which she would never forget. Yet, the young prodigy didn’t forget her homeland. She went back to the Korean National University of Arts, and completed her studies with the great violinist, Nam-yun Kim.
Anybody who has lived in Korea knows that this land has never thought of Western classical music as “foreign”. Every middle-class family has a piano or violin; every child takes lessons. The opera house and concert hall in Seoul is filled to capacity, Korean violinists play First Chair in numerous international orchestras, and bookshops are packed with musical scores.
Thus Kang felt right at home, giving her debut concert at the age of eight with the Korean Chamber Ensemble. Within the next few years, she performed with all the major Korean orchestras, including the KBS Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Bucheon and Gyeonggi philharmonics.
And in two years, she had joined that rare (but still growing) list of Asian musical prodigies from Japan, China and Southeast Asia. In her early teens, she performed to rave reviews with the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Nice Philharmonic orchestras, returning to her homeland to make her debut with the Staatskapelle Dresden at the Seoul Arts Center performing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
The prizes began piling up, as well. In 2007, she won third prize in the Tibor Varga competition, first prize in the Seoul Competition, and second prize in the Hannover International Violin Competition.
When she won in Indianapolis, her future was sealed. Concerts over the past few years include solo performances with the Dresdner Kapellsolisten, New Jersey Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Santa Fe Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra, Nagoya Philharmonic, Sendai Philharmonic, Hiroshima Symphony, Kanazawa orchestra, Taipei Symphony, and Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. Her first official recording (she had recorded the Beethoven Triple Concerto with her siblings at the age of nine) included the most difficult solo pieces by Eugene Ysaye, as well as more romantic encores.
As tough and professional as she is at the age of 24, Kang can still feel vulnerable. Her most public moment was during her prize-winning performance in Indianapolis.
“Today,” she says, “I play a Stradivarius, on loan to me. But the day before the competition, I had another violin. The sound was too bright. I couldn’t control it. I was looking for a darker sound, and nothing seemed to work.
“I cried for 40 minutes the day before I played the Beethoven’s Violin Concerto,” she confessed. “And then I realised something. I found myself thinking that Beethoven is much too great for me to control, and I should just play it, just worship it as something from above. That is what I focused on all evening.
“Music like this is simply above this Earth.”
