James Naughtie meets…
Having recovered from an injury that took her away from the concert platform for five years, the Korean violinist is now embarking on one of music’s most challenging programmes: Bach’s music for solo violin
Korean violinist Kyung Wha Chung shares her thoughts with our man from BBC Radio 4
Kyung Wha Chung admits to being depressed by the number of talented young musicians who come for a session of coaching or counselling and choose, when invited to ask anything they want, to put the question, ‘What do I do about my career?’ She knows they are really asking: ‘How do I become like you?’, and she has to explain, gently, that no two careers are the same. She is also blunt about the possibilities. ‘None of them will have a career like mine, because no one can have an identical career.’
She dispenses a dose of reality. ‘I have to give them counselling and tell them that they are absolutely different from the girl who is about to come in next. They say they’re going to enter this competition or that. But this is the wrong route. How many competitions are there on this planet? How many winners are there? Do they all have a career – meaning a career when you become a star, so to speak? No.’
She is talking to students at the college in South Korea where her mother used to teach, when she was raising a family in which four of the children became professional musicians – she and her older sister, cellist Myung Wha, and her younger brother, the pianist/conductor Myung Whun, often perform the chamber repertoire together – and it’s clear that one of her most profound hopes is that she can cut through the noise of what might be called the world of the ‘music business’ to the core, which she thinks is often forgotten, or concealed.
‘In my home country, they are obsessed with technology. But the highest form of art is not about fame or success; it is connected to your innermost consciousness, or it is nothing.
‘Ask yourself this. How do you know how to describe a colour? Monet painted his pond 3,000 times because the light changed every hour in every day. He knew that, of course, so he couldn’t stop painting it.
‘After playing for 62 years, when I hold a violin I am still astonished by the endless amount of colour in there which just never ceases to excite me. It’s never a lack of possibility that discourages me, but it’s the life that surrounds me that does, just as it’s going to surround all these young players and perhaps discourage them. For example, I have to do an interview with you…’ But she’s laughing, courteously. ‘Don’t worry, I’m kidding.’
We’re talking as she passes through London in the run-up to a significant musical event at the Barbican in May when she’ll perform in one recital the six sonatas and partitas for violin by JS Bach which she has recently recorded for Warner Classics after a 15-year absence from the recording studio. And that means we begin our conversation with the physical challenge of that programme, greatly exaggerated for her by the injury which took her away from public performance for five years.
‘One benefit I had from having a break was I lost my fear’
For a violinist who has scaled the heights of the repertoire since around 1970, after landmark performances in London and Carnegie Hall in New York, this was a nightmarish prospect. But her reflections on her time apart from high-level public performance, and on scheduling all six of the Bach sonatas and partitas in one evening – a plan which has been five whole years in the making – are instructive about her attitude to her art, her audiences, and the fundamental impulses in her musical personality.
‘When I started this project I was still suffering from physical injury and so on, and I couldn’t really work hard physically on these pieces. I did a lot of work away from the violin, and believe it or not that was a great help in dealing with this work. In a way the violin becomes a crutch and however much I didn’t want to think away from the instrument, I was forced to.
‘Being freed from my own instrument was extraordinary. Before, I was physically glued to my violin. I would play for at least an hour before I performed. I thought, that’s what I’ve got to do. Now, I play after just warming up with a few notes, getting my fingers ready. It’s a different approach. And I realise so much of it is psychological.
‘Daniel Barenboim said to me once, “I don’t need to practise, because if people need to practise it’s because of their insecurity. They need to check it all the time. I don’t need to check it.” Of course, that’s a conductor talking, as well as an amazing player. András Schiff is a little like that too. A genius.
‘Well, that’s one benefit I had from having to have that break. I lost the fear – having to have my security blanket. And, of course, it’s Bach.’
She begins to talk of how – despite a career which took her from child prodigy in South Korea in the later 1950s to young international stardom as far back as the 1970s and gave her the indelible status as one of the masters of her instrument – the enforced interruption to her international performing schedule allowed her to rethink the way the music should sound.
‘It’s just that there is the continuous possibility of music-making in this form because, first of all, as a performer you perform differently in different places. That’s obvious, because of the acoustic; it’s not a given how you will sound. Bach’s solo violin music was performed originally in a church acoustic with a different kind of pressure, in a different kind of place. Today it’s different – now it’s modern art. I have thought about this so carefully, looking at how best to deliver it and in what kind of form. This raises questions of how much vibrato and so on; how long to sustain a note in different setting. And all the time there is this weird connection to what this man, Bach, wanted to present in his day.’
In the Kensington hotel where we meet up, she talks frankly about the physical and emotional challenge of performing these pieces in one evening, with very short breaks – the sonatas in G minor, A minor and C major, with partitas in B minor, D minor and E major interspersed.
‘I will continue to play the violin until I stop playing, if you see what I mean. That’s me. But to do all these six in same evening is something that I don’t think I can carry on because it’s unfair to everybody. Physically, it’s taxing and while I’m doing other recitals and concertos, which I want to do, I just can’t do it. I was asked to do it in Paris and I said no. I hadn’t realised how much it takes out of you.’
This is from a musician with the temperament and technique to face any
‘The beauty of this music never ceases to move me’
challenge for the violin. The truth is that the determination to produce this one-night performance has brought forward new insights, even for someone who will be 70 next year. Refreshingly, in a musical world where such inconvenient or unwelcome facts are often avoided, she’s happy to talk about her age.
‘It’s very rewarding for me and it’s the most amazing journey, even at my age. My first experience on the stage doing all six was in Beijing, of all places. You don’t know what it is like until you physically experience it. But you play in front of audience then you get the feeling that this is how it was always meant to be, by Bach himself. Of course, I used to take the liberty of mixing it up in other ways – the E major and then the G minor and so on. But when I tried it with two small breaks, you know that it’s the right way because you see the mind of this composer. He starts with G minor, and following with the B minor Partita is a wonderful balance, then with the A minor and D minor, back to back – an amazing central passage – you see what he was doing.
‘I’m speechless because you’re hearing the finest form of creative contribution to human civilisation. Bach, as we know, was the shining star on top of the Christmas tree… a phenomenal genius. At least in my own way, I’ve lived with these six pieces for a long, long time. The physical challenge – I was so much in awe and intimidated that I didn’t dare to do it. I’m not a musician like András Schiff, who’s not scared of anything, so I did it in 2012 when I was 63. And of course I discovered, when I had the courage to do the whole six, that it’s only then when you see the whole patchwork for the first time.’
So we return to the question of learning, the subject that she takes on with her students, whether coaching them in technique or counselling – the work that she was encouraged to do by the Juilliard in New York with which she has had such a long relationship. We talk about the young, talented players who are thinking seriously – far too seriously, according to Kyung Wha Chung – about the trajectory of their careers.
‘What is their thought process? I tell them that they need to avoid the relentless.’
But there’s a different kind of ‘relentless’ that she thinks is not only good, but essential. It involves questioning yourself, your commitment, your technique and study, and above all your musical identity. This is what will count in the end.
‘Your identity is created by your effort. Remember how you had to relate to someone you really trusted? Preferably your parents first, but also your favourite teacher. In school we all knew when there was a teacher who was especially good and somehow formed you for the rest of your life. You have to find that little thread and hold on. Always. Then find your identity, and develop – when it comes to music – your own sound, your voice. Because your musical voice is just like your fingerprint. No one else’s is the same.
‘I have a Stradivarius now and you could have ten accomplished players picking up this instrument and it would sound completely different each time.’
We’ve been sitting together for an hour and more, and she’s warming to one theme above all – the necessity of remembering, always, the individual connection with a piece of musical inspiration. Everything else is secondary to that.
‘We know that what is important for us is that all of us – every single person – has moments which are memorable. Art, particularly in the form in the music, stays with us. One phrase or a single note can connect with your unconsciousness mind, and that becomes something memorable and lasting. It’s a lightning awakening.
You will carry that until the end of your life. This is magic, the strength of art. I don’t believe that we are in trouble when it comes to that, because I believe that as humans we all need it, and therefore we will keep up our very best efforts in Western culture, for example. We know that without it the world is a far less interesting place, because this comes from the finest part of the human spirit.’
She recalls coming to London in 1970, as her international career was beginning. The scene is imprinted on her memory. ‘It was an explosion. I was 22. And there was a kind of fusion with the audience. I will never forget it. That was when I believe it all really began.’
After the Bach evening in May, there will be, she says, many more visits here with chamber performances and no doubt some of the concertos that first propelled her in her international career – Tchaikovsky and Sibelius were the first recordings that gave her a worldwide audience. And it will be a career, even in her eighth decade, that is driven by passion.
‘It never dies,’ Kyung Wha Chung insists. ‘Because if I say that passion dies, then I am completely superficial in what I am trying to convey to you. The magic of this art sustains me. There is a fascination with human frailty and human shortcomings. But look at the world outside – politics, business, the rest of it, then consider the beauty of this music, and what’s been given to us from Bach or Schubert, Beethoven or Brahms. It never ceases to move me. I will draw my last breath with that same passion.’
Kyung Wha Chung’s recording of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas are out now on Warner