Festival in Mountains Beckons Classical Music Lovers
By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
PyeongChang lost its bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics to Russia's Sochi, but all is not lost for the county's ambitions to step out of the cultural backwater and grow into an international arena.
The Fourth Great Mountains International Music Festival, which combines classical music performances of top-notch musicians from around the world with classes and competition programs for international young talent, will take place from Aug. 3-26.
Largely based in YongPyong Resort, nestled in the scenic resort area of Gangwon Province, the three-week annual festival will include about 50 performance programs, some scores of which will be performed for the first time in Korea or even in the world.
This year's festival, held under the title ``Visionary,'' promises expansion in both scope and quality in comparison to last year, which was downsized due to flood damage in the mountainous area.
World-class musicians to perform this year include cellists Aldo Parisot, Jian Wang and Chung Myung-wha, violinist Kyoko Takezawa and violist Richard Yongjae O'Neill, as well as pianists Robert Blocker and Itamar Golan.
Parisot, the 86-year-old professor of Yale Music School, initiated a cello competition named after him here. The winner of the inaugural competition scheduled for Aug. 3-5 will receive $30,000 along with an opportunity to hold a solo recital at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Aside from the International Sejong Soloists, the permanent ensemble for the festival, the Keller Quartet from Budapest has been invited to perform numbers from Beethoven to Gyorgy Ligeti on Aug. 12.
Amid wide-ranging scores to be featured in a series of concerts of renowned performers _ from Brahms, Schubert and Mozart to Schoenberg, Dohnanyi and Golijov _ Gordon Chin's ``Haiku for Voice and Strings,'' to be performed for the first time in the world, and Tan Dun's ``Elegy: Snow in June'' stand out.
Tan Dun, a Grammy-winning composer for his scores in ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' based his ``Elegy'' on a 13th century Chinese folklore about the execution of an innocent woman. According to the folklore, after the woman's death, her blood gushed toward the sky instead of flowing on the earth; three years of drought followed with snowstorms in summer, just as she prophesied before dying.
``We're glad to be able to present the piece for the first time in Asia,'' said Kang Hyo, a renowned violinist and professor of the Julliard School and the Yale School of Music, who has been serving as artistic director of the festival. ``Employing about 80 percussion instruments from China to South Africa, it's very multi-cultural, and the work is moving and intensive.''
For the two-week school program taught by international faculty including Kang and Parisot, more than 200 students from 20 countries applied this year, according to festival officials. About 140 selected students will take part, one third of whom will be funded by the festival's scholarship scheme.
``Performances and the school programs successfully go side-by-side at the festival,'' Kang said. ``We hope that many people will come and enjoy the festival, and that the festival will also serve as an eye-opening experience for them.''
Tickets for the distinguished artists' performance series cost from 20,000 to 40,000 won, and can be purchased online at www.ticketlink.co.kr. For more information, visit www.gmmfs.com.