It's encore time for Clara-Jumi Kang. When the formidable Korean violinist appeared here last year, playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, critic James Keller praised her "truly authoritative and highly sensitive musical command". This coming Saturday, Kang has changed her violin, modified her feelings and changed her music from the very proper early 19th century Mendelssohn to a rare highly romantic surprise written 50 years later.
Violinist, Clara-Jumi Kang.
In the year since she came to Bangkok, Kang admits to having experienced much more, thus broadening her musical repertoire. She has also changed her violin. Her Stradivarius, which had been loaned to her for four years, was returned, and she performs now with an equally prestigious Guarneri violin.
"The difference," she told us, "is a darker sound, perhaps even a more interesting sound for the concerto I'm going to play here."
That work is the Violin Concerto No.3 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, a man who — like Clara-Jumi Kang — travelled widely to achieve his goals. While Saint-Saëns insisted that his music should avoid "passion", the results, according to Kang, is anything but cold.
"I don't know why this concerto isn't played everywhere. It's so colourful, so joyful, so romantic that I think Bangkok audiences will find it immediately attractive."
The Bangkok Symphony Orchestra will also be playing Maurice Ravel's entrancing Mother Goose Suite as well as the equally entrancing Dvorák Symphony No.8.
Saint-Saëns and Kang had complete opposite starts to their lives. The composer was born in a poor peasant family in France, but roamed extensively, finding joy in the Middle East, using those themes sometimes in his own music. Still, France was always his home and, during his 86 years, he knew every composer and every artist, from Franz Liszt to Stravinsky and Ravel.
True, he had some contempt for "modern" music, but after performing since he was a young child, Saint-Saëns had every right to pick and choose.
Kang, however, was not born in her parents' place of birth, but in Mannheim, Germany. Both mother and father, who took her back to Korea when she was a child, were opera singers. While she lives today in Munich, Germany, she constantly performs in Asia.
Both the composer and the violinist, however, showed their talents at an early age, with Saint-Saëns winning his first piano competition at the age of 10. Like the composer, Kang began taking piano lessons at the age of three. She soon told her parents that she wanted "a longer sound" than the piano, and the violin suited her perfectly. With inborn perfect pitch (being able to recognise the names of notes just by hearing them), she was well on her way to becoming a professional violinist by the ripe age of four.
As Germany was her childhood home, she was entered in Mannheim's prestigious music school, where she excelled far beyond her young years. Moving to another school, she soon came to the attention of German orchestras, and at nine years old, thus beating Camille Saint-Saëns by a year, she was given a concert with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra.
Her mother and father encouraged her to become a professional violinist, sending her to the world's most prestigious violin teacher, the late Dorothy DeLay, at the age of 11. That woman, who had taught virtually everybody from Sarah Chang to Pinchas Zuckerman, took young Clara under her wing, and five years later entered her in one of the world's most esteemed violin competitions, the 8th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis.
Here she won not only the Gold Medal, but five additional special prizes. She later went on to win the equally celebrated Sendai International Violin Competition.
The result is a life of touring, performing, learning and trying new music, as she will do in Bangkok. As an example of how a young violinist (she isn't even 30 yet) gains both experience and artistry, she speaks about the Saint-Saëns Concerto.
"In Bangkok, the audience is bound to love the 'Frenchness', the romantic part of this work. But when I played it before, that wasn't what I had heard.
"When I was younger, I never had many problems with any concertos I had learned. Yet at that time, I was only interested in the Saint-Saëns Concerto colour, its lines and its beautiful melodies. But as I've gotten older, I see another side of the work, and that is why I want to see how it will sound here.
"That 'other side' is the power of the music. Saint-Saëns wanted to give a classical approach to late romantic music. But as a performing artist himself, he felt an aggression with the violin, a power that I think I can demonstrate.
"In fact, my main challenge here won't be technically demanding. It will be to reach the middle point, bringing out the beauty and the muscularity at the same time."
And how does she see her audience?
"Well, the first thing is to feel how the conductor and orchestra are working with me. If I feel comfortable with them, and they feel comfortable with me, then I instinctively feel that the audience will also be satisfied and have that emotional comfort, which is so important."
Munich, Germany has such a rich cultural heritage that other violinists make it their home. But Kang is never averse to promoting that special Korean feeling toward music.
"First," she says, "until recently our country went through terrible times in war. We've suffered many burdens over the centuries, but we have such a culture of singing, that our music has always helped us. And we are always trying to find something new with this music."
"Yet our traditions go back much further than that. The music of the temples, is totally different from other Asian music, and, perhaps from those religious songs, we have a sense of inner melody. Now, more and more Koreans are studying abroad, learning to translate that melody into Western music. And that of course comes out, whether we have an ordinary life or go on concert tours."
Touring and recording are the major aspects of her life these days. When she comes back from a tour, Kang has little time for anything except practising, and — like all young people her age — getting her house clean.
But more than that, no matter where she performs, she still has that one challenge that all performing artists face.
"The only mark of success," she says, "is when I know, when I feel instinctively that an audience experiences something inside them which they have never experienced before."
- "Clara-Jumi Kang Plays Saint-Saëns" will take place on Feb 28, at Thailand Cultural Centre, 8pm.
- The Bangkok Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Jason Lai.
- Tickets from 400-2,000 baht and are now available at all Thai Ticket Major outlets and at www.thaiticketmajor.com.
- Contact Bangkok Symphony Orchestra Foundation: 02-255-6617–8, 02-254-4954, www.bangkoksymphony.org
