Bomsori Kim
About the Artists
Bomsori Kim
Changyong Shin, piano
In February 2021, Bomsori signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon in Berlin.
Highlights of Bomsori's 2024/25 season include opening with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Santtu-Matias Rouvali, debuting with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Fabio Luisi, and touring with the Bamberg Symphony and Jakub Hrůša in Germany and Asia. She will also debut with the RSB Orchestra Berlin, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and at Wigmore Hall, as well as return to the Concertgebouw with the Netherlands Radio Orchestra and Ryan Bancroft, and to Hong Kong with Paavo Järvi.
Recent highlights include her debuts at the BBC Proms with the BBC Philharmonic and at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She toured with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich and Paavo Järvi, and debuted with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Pittsburgh Symphony, and Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España. She also performed with the Vienna Symphony at the Vienna Konzerthaus and made her Concertgebouw debut with the Residentie Orkest.
Bomsori is a regular guest at renowned festivals like the Rheingau Musik Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, and Verbier Festival. In 2021, she became the Focus Artist of the Rheingau Musik Festival and began a 5-year residency at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival as Menuhin's Heritage Artist.
She has worked with leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Esteemed conductors she has collaborated with include Fabio Luisi, Paavo Järvi, Marin Alsop, and Lahav Shani.
Bomsori has performed at prestigious venues such as Vienna’s Musikverein, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Berlin Philharmonic, and Carnegie Hall in New York.
She is a prizewinner of the ARD International Music Competition, Tchaikovsky International Competition, Queen Elisabeth Competition, and the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition. She has received awards including the Young Artist Award from the Korean Ministry of Culture.
Her discography with Deutsche Grammophon includes *Violin on Stage* with the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic and a duo album with Rafał Blechacz featuring works by Fauré, Debussy, Szymanowski, and Chopin, which won the Fryderyk Music Award for “Best Polish Album Abroad.” Her latest recording of the Nielsen Violin Concerto with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Fabio Luisi won the 2024 Gramophone Award.
Born in South Korea, Bomsori studied at Seoul National University with Young Uck Kim and at The Juilliard School with Sylvia Rosenberg and Ronald Copes. She performs on the 1725 Guarnerius del Gesù violin “ex-Moller,” generously loaned by The Samsung Foundation of Culture and The Stradivari Society of Chicago.
Passionate, inspired performances and brilliant technique are the hallmark of pianist CHANGYONG SHIN, First Prize Winner of the Gina Bachauer International Artist Competition, Seoul International Music Competition, and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. In 2022, he won the Raymond E. Buck Jury Discretionary Award at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
In 2021, Changyong captivated audiences with a sold-out recital at Lotte Concert Hall, followed by a sold-out recital tour and multiple performances as part of Lotte Concert Hall’s highly selective “In-House Artist Series.” He also completed a Fantasie recital tour in several cities, including Utah, Boston, New York, Seoul, Ulsan, and Gwangju, in 2023. He has also given numerous solo performances throughout Asia, North America and Europe, including recitals at Carnegie Zankel and Weill Recital Hall, WQXR-FM’s Midday Masterpieces Series, Steinway Hall Artist Series, Marlboro Music Festival, Newport Music Festival, Italy’s Barletta Piano Festival, Klavier- Festival Ruhr (Ruhr Piano Festival) in Essen, Germany, Kumho Cultural Foundation’s Artist series and Rising Star series at Kumho Art Hall, Paris’s Salle Cortot Hall, Lotte Concert Hall in Korea, Concert Hall at Seoul Arts Center, IBK Chamber Hall in Korea, Evelyn Miller Young Pianists Series, Green Lake Festival of Music, Rose Wagner Center in Utah, Salt Lake City, Coastal Carolina University Guest Artist Series.
He has appeared as a soloist with many orchestras, including Filharmonie Brno, Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie, Utah Symphony, Hilton Head Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Chattanooga Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Korean National Symphony Orchestra, KBS Symphony Orchestra, Korean Chamber Orchestra, Daegu Philharmonic Orchestra, Sendai Philharmonic Orchestra, and others.
Mr. Shin is also a recording artist, whose debut CD was listed as one of the “Best New Recordings of 2018” by WQXR. His second album of Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt, released on Steinway & Sons Label, received rave reviews from ClassicToday. His latest album “Gaspard de la Nuit,” released on Stomp Music label in Korea, received high praise from Pizzicato.
An accomplished chamber musician, Mr. Shin has given chamber music recitals across the United States and in Seoul, Korea and Paris, France. He has appeared in recital in such renowned venues as Seoul Arts Center, Kumho Art Hall in Seoul, Daegu Concert House, Louvre Museum in Paris, New York City’s The Greene Space, Philadelphia’s Holy Trinity Church, and Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center in California among others.
Since 2024, he has dedicated himself as the host of Matinee Concert Series at Arts Center Incheon, curating a dynamic lineup of performances that include both solo showcases and chamber music collaborations with fellow musicians, culminating in four memorable concerts.
A native of South Korea, Changyong won first prize in the Young Artist Award of the National Academy of Arts, Republic of Korea, in 2022. He has pursued his musical education in the United States since 2011, earning a Bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music and both a Master’s degree and an Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School under the tutelage of Robert McDonald. After completing an Artist Diploma under the guidance of Wha Kyung Byun at the New England Conservatory.
Program
MAURICE RAVEL: Violin Sonata No. 2
JULES MASSENET: Méditation from Thaïs
KAROL SZYMANOWSHI: Nocturne and Tarantella, Op. 28
CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Violin Sonata in G minor
La fille aux cheveux
HENRYK WIENIAWSKI: Fantasie brillante on themes from Gounod’s Faust, Op. 20
Program Notes
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Violin Sonata No. 2, in G, M. 77 (1923-7)
Allegretto
Blues: Moderato
Perpetuum mobile: Allegro
A movement headed Blues is the centerpiece of the Second Violin Sonata by French composer Maurice Ravel (b. Ciboure, France, March 7, 1875; d. Paris, December 28, 1937). In it, the violin frequently echoes the wailing saxophone and both instruments recreate the sounds of the strummed banjo. One critic has even found echoes and borrowings from Jelly Roll Morton’s Black Bottom Stomp. Ravel admitted to having been impressed by the ‘‘nerve-wracking virtuosity” of the African American jazz musicians in 1920s Paris. Nevertheless, he insisted that the spirit of the music is Gallic to the core. “It is French music – Ravel's music – that I have written," he told a reporter while touring the piece in the United States and Canada.
The Violin Sonata is his final chamber work. Ravel joked that it took him four years (1923-27) to get rid of all the unnecessary notes. "In writing my Sonata, two fundamentally incompatible instruments, I assumed the task. . . of emphasizing their irreconcilability," he said. Still, like Debussy 20 years earlier, Ravel must have sensed deep down that opposites can attract. The opening Allegretto main theme is graceful and lyrical when heard on violin, more angular on the piano. It is contrasted with a persistent quirky ‘tapping’ figure which assumes more importance as this pastoral opening movement progresses. The musical material is shared between the instruments equally and fluently, with never an extraneous note. After the Blues movement, the finale is a driving perpetuum mobile, led by the violin, bringing back themes from the two earlier movements.
JULES MASSENET (1842-1912)
Meditation from Thaïs (1894)
First performed at the Paris Opéra in March 1894, Thaïs is the 24th of three dozen operas by French composer Jules Massenet (b. Montaud, Saint-Étienne, France, May 12, 1842; d. Paris, August 13, 1912). Fashionably juxtaposing erotic tension with religious fervor, Thaïs memorably portrays the transformation of a leading courtesan in fourth-century Egypt from a life of sin to one of religious devotion. A parallel conversion of a monk, from physical denial to the pleasures of the flesh, provides a compelling back story. The lovely Act 2 Méditation, featuring solo violin and marked Andante religioso, echoes the heroine’s thoughts as she contemplates the life that lies ahead.
KAROL SZYMANOWSKI (1882-1937)
Nocturne and Tarantella, for violin and piano, Op. 28 (1915)
The phrase “a composer at the crossroads” fittingly captures the restless trajectory of Karol Szymanowski (b. Tymoszówka, nr Kiev, Ukraine, October 3, 1882; d. Lausanne, Switzerland, March 29, 1937). Born at Europe’s eastern edge, he came of age just as Romanticism was fragmenting into modernism. During World War I, isolated in a wooden lakeside hut on the Polish family’s estate near Kiev, Szymanowski created his own sound world with his mystical and passionate Third Symphony (1914-16) and ecstatic First Violin Concerto (1916). A group of visionary piano and violin pieces, include the Nocturne and Tarantella, Op. 28, written in 1915 in close collaboration with the Polish virtuoso Paweł Kochański. A hallmark of these pieces is the high soaring, ecstatic violin melody heard towards the beginning of the Nocturne. It is an idiom that Szymanowski was to make distinctly his own. It recurs throughout both movements and contrasts with the Nocturne’s ominously brooding opening and a curious Spanish-flavored scherzando section. The Tarantella pulls back from exotic excess toward a more conventional, though fiercely demanding, virtuosity – brilliant, driven, and uncompromising.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
Sonata for violin and piano, L. 140 (1917)
Allegro vivo
Intermède: Fantasque et léger
Finale: Très animé
La fille aux cheveux de lin, from Préludes, Book 1 (1910)
In 1915, with Europe engulfed by war, Claude Debussy (b. St Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862; d. Paris, March 25, 1918) announced an audacious plan – a cycle of six sonatas intended as a decisive break with Austro-German Romanticism. Only three were completed, with Debussy aligning himself with the clarity, restraint, and elegance of French Baroque models such as Rameau and Couperin. He signed each score “Claude Debussy, Musicien Français” – a pointed declaration of artistic and cultural allegiance.
The Cello Sonata and the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp were finished before illness intervened. A cancer diagnosis led to surgery and radiation, leaving Debussy physically weakened and creatively stalled. The Violin Sonata proved especially difficult. Only during a recuperative stay at Cap Ferret in late 1916 did momentum return. By February 1917, the first two movements were complete: an opening anchored by the violin’s falling-third motif, followed by a movement marked “fanciful and light,” dancing with airy elegance. The finale came last, wrestled into being – vibrant and defiant to the end, Debussy’s final, completed work.
Many of Debussy’s 24 Préludes have a fin-de-siècle feeling, representing evocative tone painting in the subtlest manner and inviting a theatre of the mind. In the most familiar of the preludes, The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, the young girl singing in the morning sunshine in a poem by French poet Leconte de Lisle which first inspired Debussy, is not French at all – but Scottish. Debussy had set the poem as a song 30 years earlier, in 1880. But Scotland was then just as distant and exotic an inspiration for the Romantics and Impressionists as were Italy, Spain, the Far East and ancient Greece.
HENRYK WIENIAWSKI (1835-1880)
Fantasie brillante on themes from Gounod’s Faust, Op. 20 (1865-6)
Henryk Wieniawski (b. Lublin, Poland, July 10, 1835; d. Moscow, March 31, 1880) composed his Fantasie brillante on themes from Gounod’s Faust, Op. 20 (1865-6) at the height of an international career. Training at the Paris Conservatoire, led to a period of relentless touring and writing music designed to electrify large public audiences. From 1860, he spent a dozen years in Russia, already a familiar visitor, now playing an important role in developing the Russian violin school. Here, he was solo violinist to the Tsar, concert master of both orchestra and string quartet of the Russian Musical Society and, for six years, violin professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory. His schedule allowed time for composition of some of his best music – including the Second Violin Concerto, Op. 22 and the Fantasie brillante, Op. 20.
Since its 1859 premiere, Gounod’s Faust had become one of the most popular operas in Europe, and its melodies were instantly recognizable. Wieniawski, a product of French training and Slavonic temperament, extracts the opera’s emotional high points – seduction, lyric reverie, diabolical sparkle – and reshapes them into a concert fantasy, culminating in the closing Act 2 waltz Ainsi que la brise légère. Structurally free, the piece alternates vocal-style lyricism with dazzling passagework and bravura fireworks – a vehicle for charisma, control, and unapologetic virtuosity.
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Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner.
Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
Acknowledgements
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