11/12/2022, Soovin Kim, violin, and Gloria Chien, piano

This concert is presented by the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. 404.727.5050 | schwartz.emory.edu | boxoffice@emory.edu

Audience Information

Please turn off all electronic devices.

Health and Safety

The Schwartz Center follows the Emory University Visitor Policy with additional protocols outlined at schwartz.emory.edu/faq.

Photographs and Recordings

Digital capture or recording of this concert is not permitted.

Ushers

The Schwartz Center welcomes a volunteer usher corps of approximately 60 members each year. Visit schwartz.emory.edu/volunteer or call 404.727.6640 for ushering opportunities.

Accessibility

The Schwartz Center is committed to providing performances and facilities accessible to all. Please direct accommodation requests to the Schwartz Center Box Office at 404.727.5050, or by email at boxoffice@emory.edu.

Design and Photography Credits

Cover Design: Lisa Baron | Cover Photo: Mark Teague

Acknowledgment

This season, the Schwartz Center is celebrating 20 years of world-class performances and wishes to gratefully acknowledge the generous ongoing support of Donna and Marvin Schwartz.

Society of

Program

Petite Suite, L 65 Claude Debussy En bateau (1862–1918) Cortège Menuet Ballet

Gloria Chien and William Ransom, piano

Sonata for 2 violins, op. 56 Sergei Prokofiev Andante cantabile (1891–1953) Allegro Commodo (quasi allegretto) Allegro con brio

Soovin Kim and Emily Daggett Smith, violin

Terzetto in C Major, op. 74 Antonin Dvořák Introduzione: Allegro ma non troppo (1841–1904) Larghetto

Scherzo: Vivace—Trio: Poco meno mosso Tema con variazioni

Soovin Kim and Emily Daggett Smith, violin; Yinzi Kong, viola

—Intermission—

Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Ernest Chausson String Quartet, op. 21 (1855-1899)

Décidé—Animé

Sicilienne: Pas vite Grave Très animé

Soovin Kim, violin; Gloria Chien, piano; Vega Quartet

The Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta is supported by the Cherry L. Emerson Endowment, the Rebecca Katz-Doft Chamber Music Endowment, the Ethel Orentlicher Gershon Fund, a generous gift from Dr. John and Linda Cooke, and by music lovers like you.

Performer Biographies

Pianist Gloria Chien, selected by the Boston Globe as one of its Superior Pianists of the Year, was praised by music critic Richard Dyer for “a wondrously rich palette of colors, which she mixes with dashing bravado and with an uncanny precision of calibration. . . . Chien’s performance had it all.”

Chien made her orchestral debut at age 16 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since then, she has appeared as a soloist under the batons of Sergiu Comissiona, Keith Lockhart, Thomas Dausgaard, Irwin Hoffman, Benjamin Zander, and Robert Bernhardt. She is a prize winner of the World Piano Competition, Harvard Musical Association Award, and the San Antonio International Piano Competition—where she also received the prize for Best Performance of the Commissioned Work. Chien has presented solo recitals at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Harvard Musical Association, Sanibel Musical Festival, Caramoor Musical Festival, Salle Cortot in Paris, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan.

An avid chamber musician, Chien has been the resident pianist with the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston since 2000—a group known for its versatility and commitment to new music—and recently recorded with clarinetist Anthony McGill. Her CD with violinist Joanna Kurkowicz, featuring music of Grazyna Bacewicz, was released on Chandos Records. Of this recording, International Record Review writes, “[the violinist] could ask for no more sensitive or supportive a pianist than Gloria Chien.” Harmonie magazine writes, “. . . but it would be unfair not to mention the pianist, who is accompanying the soloist in an absolutely responsive, impressive and confident way. She is more than an accompanist — rather, she is an equivalent partner to the soloist.” The Strad praises her for “super performances . . . accompanied with great character.” Chien has also received fantastic reviews in Gramophone, American Record Guide, and Muzyka 21.

Chien has participated in such festivals as Chamber Music Northwest, Music Academy of the West, Verbier Music Festival, and Music@Menlo, where she was appointed director of the Chamber Music Institute in 2010 by artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han. Her recent performances include collaborations with the St. Lawrence, Miró, Borromeo, Daedalus, and Jupiter String Quartets; David Shifrin, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Joseph Silverstein, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Ani Kavafian, Ida Kavafian, Wu Han, Rob Kapilow, Paul Neubauer, Roberto Diaz, Andres Diaz, Sharon Robinson, James Ehnes, Nai-Yuan Hu, Bion Tsang, Soovin Kim, Carolin Widmann, Edward Arron, and Anthony McGill.

In fall of 2009, Chien launched String Theory, a chamber music series at the Hunter Museum of American Art in downtown Chattanooga, as its founder and artistic director.

Chien began playing the piano at the age of five in her native Taiwan. She has a doctorate in musical arts, a master’s degree, and a bachelor’s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Her teachers have included Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun. She is an associate professor at Lee University in Cleveland, TN, and is a member of the prestigious Chamber Music Society Two of Lincoln Center. Chien is a Steinway Artist.

Korean-American violinist Soovin Kim has built on the early successes of his prize-winning years to emerge as a mature and communicative artist. After winning first prize at the Niccolò Paganini International Competition, Kim was the recipient of the prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the Henryk Szeryng Foundation Career Award. Today he enjoys a broad musical career, regularly performing repertoire such as Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin; sonatas for violin and piano by Beethoven, Brahms, and Ives; string quartets; Mozart and Haydn concertos and symphonies as a conductor; and world-premiere works almost every season.

In recent seasons Kim has been acclaimed for his “superb . . . impassioned” (Berkshire Review) performance of Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto at the Bard Festival with the American Symphony Orchestra and a “sassy, throaty” (Philadelphia Inquirer) rendition of Kurt Weill’s concerto with the Curtis Chamber Orchestra. Other notable concerto collaborations included Mendelssohn’s Double Concerto with conductor Maestro Myung-Whun Chung, the same Mendelssohn concerto with the Dallas Symphony and music director Jaap van Zweden, 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 Chung.

For 20 years, Kim was the first violinist of the Johannes String Quartet. Among their special projects was a two-season tour with the famed and now-retired Guarneri String Quartet in an unusual program including world premieres of works by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Derek Bermel, and William Bolcom. Kim maintains a close relationship with the Marlboro Festival, where he regularly spends his summers. He is well-known in Korea as a member of MIK—his ground-breaking piano quartet ensemble. He recently launched the exciting Chien-Kim-Watkins Trio with his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, and cellist Paul Watkins of the Emerson Quartet.

Kim’s latest solo CD, Gypsy, was his third solo collaboration between American label Azica Records and Korea-based Stomp/EMI. They previously released a French album of Fauré and Chausson with pianist Jeremy Denk and the Jupiter Quartet, and Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices for solo violin—which 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.

Kim also has six commercial chamber music recordings, including an acclaimed live performance from the Marlboro Festival of Beethoven’s “Archduke” trio with pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the late cellist David Soyer.

Kim founded the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, VT, in 2009. With its focused programming and exceptional artists, the festival is praised as one of this country’s summer chamber music meccas. Kim and the Lake Champlain festival helped to create the ONE Strings program in Burlington, which makes violin lessons part of the regular curriculum for every 3rd–5th grader. In May 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Vermont in recognition of his contributions to the community.

Kim dedicates much of his time to his passion for teaching. He has been on the faculties of Stony Brook University and the Peabody Institute and now teaches exclusively at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music with David Cerone and Donald Weilerstein, and at the Curtis Institute of Music with Victor Danchenko and Jaime Laredo.

“Kim’s silky sound and unfettered lyricism, passion, and tenderness was matched and complemented by Chien’s rhapsodic performance that employed a rich palette of colors and perfectly balanced power, almost ‘singing’ the part.”

—Rutland Herald

Pianist, artistic director, master teacher, editor, and judge for international competitions, William Ransom regularly appears in recital, as a soloist with orchestras, and as a chamber musician throughout the world. He has performed in New York’s Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Town Hall, and Merkin Hall; in orchestra halls in Chicago, Detroit, and Atlanta; at the National Gallery in Washington DC; and in Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Dallas, and Los Angeles. He has performed for the American ambassadors to Japan, Korea, Austria, and Ireland, and his performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio and television in the United States, Japan, Korea, Argentina, and Poland. His recordings of Enoch Arden by Richard Strauss, The Music of Alfredo Barili, Chamber Music of Johannes Brahms, and Listening to Memories with Chopin, Brahms, and Bach were released on the ACA label. Ransom can also be heard on Heartkeys from Rising Star Records.

Ransom commissioned and premiered several major works by composer Stephen Paulus including his Concerto for Piano and Wind Ensemble. He was also the featured pianist performing music by Dwight Andrews in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway hit, The Piano Lesson, as well as the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie based on the same play. A popular performer on many university concert series, he has performed at numerous colleges around the world including Yale, Cornell, Duke, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Toho (Japan), Yonsei (Korea), and the School of the Arts (Argentina) where he has also given master classes.

Born in Boston and raised in Nashville, Ransom began his musical studies at an early age. He was a scholarship student of William Masselos at the Juilliard School in New York (BM and MM), and he also worked with Theodore Lettvin at the University of Michigan (DMA) and Madame Gaby Casadesus at the Ravel Academy in France. Ransom is currently the Mary L. Emerson Professor of Piano at Emory University. He is founder and artistic director of the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta and has collaborated with such artists as cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Steven Isserlis; clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; members of the Juilliard, Emerson, Tokyo, Cleveland, St. Petersburg, American, Borromeo, Lark, Cavani, and Muir string quartets; violinists William Preucil, Elmar Oliviera, Tim Fain, and Robert McDuffie; guitarist Eliot Fisk; and members of the Empire Brass Quintet, the Eroica Trio, and the percussion group Nexus, among many others. For 10 years he was an artist-faculty member of the Kamisaibara Pianists Camp in Japan, and in 2016 he was named artistic director of the Juneau Jazz & Classics Festival in Alaska. Ransom was recently named one of Musical America Worldwide’s “30 Musical Innovators.”

The Vega String Quartet

The Vega String Quartet, quartet-in-residence at Emory University, is cultivating a new generation of chamber music lovers through dynamic performances and innovative community engagement. The New York Times raved that “[the quartet’s] playing had a kind of clean intoxication to it, pulling the listener along . . . the musicians took real risks in their music making” and the Los Angeles Times praised the group’s “triumphant L.A. debut.” The quartet concertizes both nationally and internationally, most recently in Baltimore, Chicago, St. Thomas (USVI), Berlin, San Miguel (Mexico), the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Brahmssaal in Vienna’s Musikverein. The quartet’s major performance projects at Emory have included the complete cycle of Beethoven quartets, as well as pairing Bach’s complete works for solo violin, viola, and cello with the six Bartók quartets. It has also developed a series of “Jazz Meets Classics” programs, bringing the two genres together.

One of the unique aspects of the quartet’s residency at Emory is to bring performance into the classroom, collaborating with academic professors to create interdisciplinary parallels and conversations. The members also enrich the cultural life of their community, having founded the Emory Youth Chamber Music Program, which gives intensive training in small ensemble playing to advanced pre-college students. The quartet was appointed to the roster of the Woodruff Arts Center’s Young Audiences program, engaging thousands of students throughout the greater-Atlanta school systems. The musicians have also held residencies in Augusta, Jacksonville, and Juneau, which combined traditional performances with educational outreach, performances in non-traditional venues, and masterclasses for area students.

Emily Daggett Smith and Jessica Shuang Wu, violins; Yinzi Kong, viola; Guang Wang, cello

The quartet has won numerous international awards, including at the Bordeaux String Quartet Competition, as well as top prizes from the Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition, the Carmel Chamber Music Competition, and the National Society of Arts and Letters String Quartet Competition. The group tours throughout Asia, Europe, and North America, and has appeared at Weill Hall and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Bargemusic, and Duke Hall at the Royal Academy of Music, London. The members of the quartet collaborate with some of the world’s finest musicians including Andres Cardenes, Eliot Fisk, Christopher O’Riley, William Preucil, Richard Stoltzman, Mark O’Connor, Robert Spano, Charles Wadsworth, Peter Wiley, and the Eroica Trio. They also commission, premier, and record works by leading composers. The quartet is a frequent guest at numerous music festivals, including Amelia Island, Aspen, Brevard, Highlands-Cashiers, Juneau Jazz & Classics, Kingston, Mostly Mozart, Rockport, San Miguel de Allende, and SummerFest La Jolla.

Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta

Celebrating its milestone 30th anniversary season, the Southeast’s largest and most active chamber music organization brings together some of the city’s finest resident musicians with internationally-known performers who are dedicated to performing the most delightful, exciting, and interesting music from the chamber repertoire in some of the most acoustically and visually beautiful spaces in Atlanta. Guests have included Yo-Yo Ma, Richard Stoltzman, Alan Gilbert, Dave Brubeck, William Preucil, Eliot Fisk, Mark O’Connor, Robert Spano, and many others.

Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta’s mission is to create new generations of passionate and educated music lovers who will cherish and support this great art forever. To support this mission by giving to ECMSA, visit chambermusicsociety.emory.edu.

A full schedule of ECMSA events taking place on Emory’s campus and throughout the community can be found online at chambermusicsociety.emory.edu, or by scanning the QR code.

Upcoming Emory Music Concerts

Many fall music events at Emory are free to attend. Visit music.emory.edu or schwartz.emory.edu to view descriptions and information for upcoming music events. If an event requires a ticket for attendance, prices are indicated in the listings below in the following order: Full price/Emory student price (unless otherwise noted as the price for all students).

Sunday, November 13, 4:00 p.m., Emory Chamber Ensembles, Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall, free

Sunday, November 13, 7:00 p.m., Emory Collaborative Piano, Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall, free

Wednesday, November 16, 8:00 p.m., Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra, Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall, free

Thursday, November 17, 8:00 p.m., Maria Schneider Orchestra, Candler Concert Series, Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall, $70/$10, tickets required

Saturday, November 19, 8:00 p.m., Emory University Symphony Orchestra and Emory Wind Ensemble, featuring Concerto and Aria Competition Winner, Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall, free

Tuesday, November 29, 8:00 p.m., Emory Jazz Ensembles, Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall, free

Wednesday, November 30, 8:00 p.m., Fall Composition Showcase, Performing Arts Studio, free

Friday, December 2, noon, Kyung and Michael Kim, duo pianists, ECMSA: Cooke Noontime Concert, Carlos Museum, free online registration required

Friday, December 2, 8:00 pm; Saturday, December 3, 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, Glenn Auditorium, $20/$10, tickets required

Friday, December 9 and Saturday, December 10, 8:00 p.m.; Sunday, December 11, 4:00 p.m., Christmas with Atlanta Master Chorale, Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall, $38/$10 all students, tickets required

Music at Emory

Music