Putting musicians and dancers together on the same stage should be the most natural thing on earth, given their shared appreciation for rhythm, movement and line.
In reality, however, the two worlds seldom meet as artistic equals: Dancers routinely use music as a floor for dancing, while musicians tend to regard ballet with lofty indifference, if not outright scorn, as if its rightful place were several notches below serious music on the cultural totem pole.
Young Uck Kim is one artist who has resolved to bring music and dance back together on equal footing, so to speak.
When the South Korean-born violinist returns to Orchestra Hall Sunday afternoon to perform a recital of works by Stravinsky and Ravel, it will be in tandem with a pair of dancers, New York City Ballet soloists Darci Kistler and Nikolaj Hubbe. His pianist will be Staffan Scheja. Their meeting ground: George Balanchine’s choreography to Stravinsky’s “Duo Concertant.”
Balanchine’s neoclassical masterpiece is the focal point of a fascinatingly offbeat program sponsored in Chicago by Performing Arts Chicago that Kim and friends also are presenting this season in New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The project, according to Kim, has been more than 20 years in the making. The violinist first saw Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant” on television in 1974 at the same time he was learning the 1932 original, for violin and piano, and he was blown away by it. “I thought the ballet was just extraordinarily beautiful, so pure, so intimate,” he says. Immediately he wanted to perform the Stravinsky with dancers.
But there were obstacles to be overcome first. Because his managers knew nothing about dancers, he had to put the project together with a producer, Jane Hermann, savvy to the ways of the ballet world. He wanted to program another dance work along with the Stravinsky, but the Balanchine estate would let him have “Duo Concertant” only if it was the only dance on the program. Once the rights were cleared, City Ballet director Peter Martins “picked these two dancers for me, which I’m grateful for,” says Kim.
The violinist and friends tried out the piece last August at a small festival in Germany before bringing it to New York in November. Rehearsals were a real eye-opener for him. “I had never dealt with dancers before so I didn’t know if I had to change my way of playing. I thought the dancers would be very demanding about tempos and phrasing, but they were so flexible. I play the way I play normally, and they just fit in.”
The dancers seem equally pleased to be sharing the stage with real, live musicians for a change. “I’ve never danced this work with a solo musician of (Kim’s) caliber,” Kistler says. “He is able to lend himself to dancers. It’s rare for a musician of his caliber to do that.”
Equally rare is the good-humored self-effacement with which Kim looks back on his three decades as an international soloist and chamber musician.
A product of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with the legendary violin teacher Ivan Galamian, the 47-year-old Kim is of the same generation as another well-known Korean violinist, Kyung Wha Chung. Unlike Chung, however, Kim did not start out as a prodigy, nor does he harbor any particular sense of Asian identity.
“In some ways feeling Asian can limit you,” the violinist explains, “because Western music expresses everything, the gamut of emotional expression. Basically you are bleeding in front of the audience, sometimes actually so,” he says, with an explosive laugh that signals the jokester lurking behind the urbane exterior.
Kidding aside, Kim says that “when I am playing I never think of myself as being of any particular race. I can’t. I don’t have time to, because you have to get into whatever music you are trying to convey to the audience, rather than thinking about who you are.
“In my everyday life, that’s another story. These days I live partly in Connecticut, partly in Paris. I teach young violinists at a school in Detmold, Germany. Sometimes I have no idea what my life is all about. I have to ask myself from time to time: What am I doing here?”
It was the great pianist Rudolf Serkin who first took notice of Kim’s talent. That was in 1959, when the boy was only 9 and just starting out on the violin in his native Seoul. “At the time I really wasn’t sure I wanted to be a musician. I thought I might go into medicine or law, like my father and brothers,” Kim recalls.
The boy and his sister, a gifted pianist, grew up in an affluent home where Western classical music was a focal part of everyday life. His mother regularly entertained Western musicians who performed in Seoul, which is how Serkin got to audition Young Uck and his sister.
“I am sure he was more impressed with my sister, a wonderful pianist, than with me,” Kim recalls, “but he invited both of us to come to Curtis to study.”
He was 12 when he came to America and began taking lessons from Galamian, a formidable figure and a sternly demanding teacher. “I’m a small person, but then I was even smaller, and here was this huge man with the most intense, dark eyes. Scary! I felt a sudden fear and urge to escape.”
Kim had good reason to be intimidated. He had arrived at Galamian’s studio with no solid technical preparation on the violin. His bow arm technique, by his own admission, was a mess. “In Korea, I had 10 different teachers in seven years and I had horrible training,” he says. “That was soon after the Korean War and nothing like a music school existed. Most Korean musicians were self-taught.” Galamian had to substantially rebuild his technique, initially by playing scales, over and over again.
The process took a lot of toil, and not just because of Kim’s bad habits. Newly liberated from the control of his family, living on his own for the first time in his life, the young fiddle player chafed at the discipline imposed by his teacher. With his pal pianist Peter Serkin, Rudolf’s son, he spent most of his spare time watching movies when he should have been practicing. During one of their lessons Galamian became so exasperated by Kim’s laziness that he hurled a piano bench against a wall. Terrified, Kim spent the following weeks virtually locked in his practice room.
After eight years Galamian’s rigorous tutelage paid off. “He really took me under his wing. We had a great relationship right up to his death (in 1981). Even today when I am practicing I hear his words in my head,” says Kim.
Conductor Eugene Ormandy got wind of the young Korean through several musicians at Curtis and arranged for Kim to make his debut, at 15, in a nationally televised concert with his Philadelphia Orchestra. Kim shared the spotlight with another promising soloist, pianist Andre Watts. There followed another national telecast, a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert with Leonard Bernstein. Kim caught the ear of Arthur Judson, one of New York’s major concert managers. Before long he was fielding up to 100 offers to perform concerts.
“I didn’t know I had the right to say yes or no,” Kim told Strad magazine in 1987. “The concerts were presented to me as `go and play.’ Frankly, I don’t see how anyone in his teens is emotionally ready for the life of a touring musician; it’s pushing a child into an unreal world. I kept playing, but I felt that this had become my life without my having had anything to do with it.”
Looking back on it all today, Kim considers himself lucky not to have been identified as a prodigy, with all the internal and external pressures that attend instrumentalists who are presented to the world at a very early age as fully formed soloists.
The example of Midori, the Japanese violinist, now 23, who got her start as a tiny 10-year-old prodigy, springs inevitably to mind. Faced with assorted problems apparently related to her having reached fast-track celebrity before she was even a teenager, she canceled four months of concerts last fall because of what music insiders called an eating disorder.
“Let’s face it, music is something that takes time,” Kim says. “There is so much one has to learn and experience; it’s just an endless, endless search. It is very hard, when the world tells you you’ve reached the top at age 16. It must be frightening to wake up at a certain point and realize, `Oh my God, my life hasn’t even begun yet.’
“I recently told my mother I’m very grateful to her that she didn’t decide to come to America with me and my sister when I was 12,” Kim says. “I was left alone to grow up and I didn’t see my parents for many years. In certain ways it may have been easier for me to have strong guidance during my adolescence. On the other hand, I never felt pressured by my family.”
Paradoxically, Kim concedes, the prominence of so many exceptionally gifted Asian instrumentalists in today’s musical world has a lot to do with the pressures he says he escaped.
“One reason there are so many Asian musicians around is the discipline their parents have instilled in them from an early age. . . . Asian kids study almost 18 hours a day. And I’m not even talking about musicians, just those going to regular school! Without that kind of discipline, you can’t play an instrument.”
Kim has attracted much attention because of his commitment to contemporary music. He has commissioned violin sonatas from both Andre Previn and Tobias Picker, and Gunther Schuller has written a violin concerto for him. The composers with whom Kim has worked genuinely respect and admire him.
“I have known and played chamber music with Young Uck since the beginning of my serious career 25 years ago,” says Previn. “He’s a very ingratiating person, widely traveled, with a wonderfully ribald sense of humor. He’s quite a sybarite; he likes the best hotels, the best food, the nicest clothes. . . .
“And he does not manufacture his temperament. It comes out perfectly normally as soon as he picks up the violin. Very often people are terrific instrumentalists but not wonderful musicians. With him I think being a musician comes first. He’s just as passionate about music today as he was when he began. He sometimes hides it, because nowadays it’s not considered cool to be openly enamored of music. But he is just as passionate about music today as he was at the beginning of his career.”
