Faculty Recital: Soovin Kim, Violin

Artist(s)

Soovin Kim enjoys a broad musical career, regularly performing Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, sonatas for violin and piano ranging from Beethoven to Ives, conducting Mozart and Haydn concertos and symphonies, and performing world premieres of new works almost every season. When he was 20 years old, Mr. Kim received first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition. Among his many commercial recordings are his “thrillingly triumphant” (Classic FM Magazine) disc of Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices.

Soovin Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (LCCMF) in Burlington, Vermont. In addition to its explorative programming and extensive work with living composers, LCCMF created the ONE Strings program through which all 3rd through 5th grade students of the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington study violin. The University of Vermont recognized Soovin Kim’s work by bestowing an honorary doctorate upon him in 2015. In 2020, he and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, became Artistic Directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center awarded Gloria Chien and Soovin Kim the Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music for the more than 100 performances, lectures, interviews, and master classes they presented for online audiences around the world since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Mr. Kim has immersed himself in the string quartet literature for 20 years as the first violinist of the Johannes Quartet and now performs piano trios with Gloria Chien and cellist Paul Watkins in the Chien-Kim-Watkins Trio. Soovin Kim spent summers at and maintained a close relationship with the Marlboro Music Festival for 25 years. Mr. Kim is a full-time violin faculty member at NEC and also teaches at the Yale School of Music.