Soovin Kim, violin

Korean-American violinist Soovin Kim is an exciting young player who has built on the early successes of his prize-winning years to emerge as a mature and communicative artist. Mr. Kim enjoys a broad musical career, regularly performing repertoire such as Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, Mozart and Vivaldi concerti without conductor as well as big Romantic concerti, sonatas for violin and piano by Beethoven, Brahms, and Ives with duo partner Jeremy Denk, and new world-premiere works almost every season.

The 2010-11 season began with a “superb…impassioned” (Berkshire Review) performance of Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto at the Bard Festival with the American Symphony Orchestra. Last April he gave a “sassy, throaty” (Philadelphia Inquirer) rendition of Kurt Weill’ concerto with the Curtis Chamber Orchestra. Other unusual concerto collaborations in the past year included Mendelssohn’s Double Concerto with pianist Julius Jeongwon Kim and Maestro Myung-Whun Chung, and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in Carnegie Hall. He has performed in past seasons with the Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Stuttgart Radio Symphony, Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, and the Seoul Philharmonic and Accademia di Santa Cecilia Orchestra with Maestro Myung-Whun Chung.

Soovin Kim performs as 1st violinist of the Johannes String Quartet. For the last two seasons they toured together with the famed and now-retired Guarneri String Quartet in an unusual program that included world-premieres of quartets by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Derek Bermel, and an octet by William Bolcom. Mr. Kim maintains a close relationship with the famed Marlboro Music Festival where he often spends his summers. He is well-known in Korea as a member of MIK, his ground-breaking piano quartet ensemble.

Soovin Kim’s latest CD, Gypsy, was released in September 2010. It is his third collaboration between American label Azica Records and Korea-based Stomp/EMI. They previously released a French album of Fauré and Chausson with Jeremy Denk and the Jupiter Quartet in 2008, and Niccolò Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices for solo violin in February 2006 was named Classic FM magazine’s Instrumental Disc of the Month (“he emerges thrillingly triumphant…a thrilling debut disc.”). He made his first solo recording with Jeremy Denk for Koch-Discover in duo works by Schubert, Bartók, and Strauss.

In 2005 Soovin Kim was awarded the prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, and also previously received the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Henryk Szeryng Foundation Career Award and first prize at the Paganini International Competition. In addition to his solo recordings, he has recorded three albums with MIK including one of four commissioned works by Korean composers written for MIK. He also made recent recordings with cellist Janos Starker of string quintets of Boccherini and Schubert and with cellist Lynn Harrell of the Arensky cello quartet, both released by Delos.

Soovin Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in 2010 in Burlington, Vermont. After only two years the festival has already established a reputation as one of the finest of its kind in the U.S. Mr. Kim is also a sought-after teacher; he previously taught at Yale University and is currently a professor at Stony Brook University in the U.S. and an International Visiting Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Mr. Kim studied when he was younger at the Cleveland Institute of Music with David Cerone and Donald Weilerstein, and graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music with Victor Danchenko and Jaime Laredo.

Mr. Kim plays on the 1709 “ex-Kempner” Stradivarius that is on temporary loan to him.