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INTERVIEW MIN KYM
10.02.17
www.thebookseller.com
Min Kym
Min Kym’s soulmate was a 1696 Stradivarius—which she played in concert halls around the world—until the day it was stolen and her world came apart
BY CAROLINE SANDERSON
she was seven years old. A tiny child in white socks, she is playing the quarter- size violin tucked under her chin with the demeanour of a virtuoso.
M CV QUICK
1978 1990 1991 2004 2007 2017
Born Seoul, South Korea
Wins first prize in the Premier Mozart Competition
in Kym and I are looking closely at a black and white photograph left, taken when
METADATA “I’m
Début concert with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra
Wins the International Jascha Heifetz Competition for Violinists
Records Beethoven’s Violin Concerto for Sony Classical
Publishes Gone; releases CD with Warner Classics
playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto,” says Kym, after studying the position of her hands. Born in South Korea, Min Kym, now an elegant and engaging woman in her late thirties, was a child prodigy. As she records in the first half of her intense and elegiac memoir, Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung, she began playing the violin at the age of six; her family had recently relocated to the UK for her father to take up a mechanical engineer post. Kym’s mother, a child of the Korean War and a classical music lover, initially hoped violin lessons would keep her younger daughter quiet. “I was kicking my heels, watching my sister play the piano and I think I was being a bit of a pain, so my Mum said: ‘Why don’t you learn something as well?’” Her first lesson was life-changing. “People talk about that first rush. I’ll never forget the first time I picked up a violin. I didn’t realise it then, but what I was feeling was love.” For a Korean child, trying to adjust to an alien culture, thousands of miles from the bulk of her family, the violin provided a kind of anchor. “The instrument just seemed to complete my life,” she recalls. The rapidity of Kym’s progress was extraordinary. She passed Grade 2 after eight weeks of playing, and a month later, Grade 4 with the highest mark in the country. At seven, she became the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. Her family began to make sacrifices in order to support her fledgling career. “Already it was being made very clear to me, what they thought I was, what they thought I’d become.” With the obedience and conformity traditionally expected of a Korean child, Kym followed the path that was being laid out for her. Occasionally, as Kym’s violin increasingly did her talking for her, a warning note would sound: “I
Imprint Viking Publication 06.04.16 Formats EB/HB/Audio ISBN 9780241977392, 263150/1977408 Rights sold to Crown in the US Editor Joel Rickett Agent Annabel Merullo, PFD
would hear the words ‘child prodigy’ said of me all the time, and sometimes I used to ponder: What does that mean? I was aware that it was causing a sort of distance.” At the age of 11 she won her first major international competition, and despite yearning for “a normality that was denied me”, her teens brought increasing amounts of foreign travel as she gave recitals around the world. “Min the violinist getting ahead . . . Min the person going nowhere,” she writes of this time, when a starry career as a solo performer and recording artist beckoned. Then, at the age of 21, Kym fell in
love. Having played a succession of increasingly fine violins throughout her early career, she was offered the chance to buy a 1696 Stradivarius. Gone contains a wealth of fascinating detail about violin anatomy and what makes Stradivarius violins so special—and so
often the chosen instruments of virtuoso soloists. “The sound has a purity and an open, bell-like quality. When you play a Stradivarius, there’s this glow, this whoosh around the note which is unmistakable,” Kym tells me.
DEVASTATING INSIGHT
Each Stradivarius violin also has its own distinct personality. And the 1696 Strad that Kym played that day felt destined for her from the beginning. “The instant I drew the first breath with my bow, I knew,” she writes. “Now I held the violin that would be the key to my art, that would will me to produce all that I could produce . . . this was marriage till death do us part.” It was like meeting her soulmate. “It was quite small, with narrow shoulders. For me that was perfect, because I don’t have terribly big hands. Physically my violin and I were just so compatible; an incredible fit. And this hypnotic, silken sound came from the top register and I just fell in love with it straight away.” The violin cost £450,000. In order to buy it, Kym
remortgaged her flat and took out a huge loan. It was another three years before she found the perfect bow to go with it. For the next 10 years, she and her violin
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