David Kim: 'It's always late autumn in Tchaikovsky'
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A good starting question when interviewing any musician could be “How did you get started playing your instrument?”
But David Kim doesn’t remember.
“My mother had my destiny all set before I was even born,” he said.
When he was 3, Santa Claus brought him a 1/8 size violin and from there, “I can’t remember a day in my life when I didn’t play violin,” he said.
What he does remember is that his mother was a tough task-master.
“She was a well-known pianist in Korea and came here as a master’s student, but then I came along a surprise while she was still in graduate school,” he said. “My father wanted a big family, but she refused to have other children because it would be a distraction to my career.
“I was practicing five hours a day by the time I was 8 years old and there were days I hated it, days when I threw the violin on my bed, but there was never a time to say, ‘I quit,’” he said. “The thought never crossed my mind because it was an all-encompassing part of my life.”
Indeed, he said the only slack time he ever had as far as music goes was when his mother died when he was 14.
“There were two years that I barely practiced, but going through that time let me know that I really loved the violin,” he said.
By the time he was 17, he was enrolled at Julliard and began pursuing a career as a concert performer.
“I was pretty much groomed to be a Yo-Yo Ma or an Itzhak Perlman,” he said. “I naively thought it was a given and everyone spoke to me as if it were a given. It took a long time to realize that it wasn’t going to happen.”
So in 1999, in his 30s, he decided to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t at that level and began looking for a full-time job in a very competitive market. After auditions with seven different orchestras, he landed a position as the concertmaster for the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Oddly enough, however, the prestigious job gave him the boost he needed to get more solo gigs.
“Now I feel like I occupy an enviable position,” he said. “I don’t have to work so hard to get concerts and I can stay home most of the time to be with my two daughters.”
For his performance with the Miami University Symphony, he will play one of his work-horse pieces, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35, one of the best known of all violin concertos and is also considered to be among the most technically difficult works for violin.
“It’s pretty much the only piece I can say I know like the back of my hand,” Kim said. “I find it’s the best audience piece there is, a guaranteed standing ovation.”
This, he said, is in spite of the fact that many people consider Tchaikovsky a second-rate composer, not quite up to the genius of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, but as the only American to win a prize at the International
Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Kim perhaps has a deeper understanding.
“There’s always some angst and suffering in Tchaikovsky’s work,” he said. “There’s a chill in the air and it’s always late autumn in Tchaikovsky. I never get tired of it.”
how to go
- WHAT: David Kim with the Miami Symphony Orchestra
- WHERE: Hall Auditorium, Miami University, Oxford
- WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
- COST: $10 adults; $9 seniors; $5 students/youth
- MORE INFO: (513) 529-3200; tickets.muohio.edu
