Violinist Chung Kyung-wha, who recently completed a four-city tour on Dec. 26, is returning to the stage on Jan. 15 with her younger brother Chung Myung-whun, music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra (SPO) at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.
As soloist of the New Year concert of the SPO, she will play Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy,” a piece she performed for a legendary Decca recording with German maestro Rudolf Kempe conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1970s. The recording also features Bruch’s popular violin concerto.
Ray Minshull, head of Decca’s classical artists’ department from 1967 to 1994, once made a remark about Chung’s impeccable interpretation of the formerly unknown “Scottish Fantasy.”
“At the time there were considerable reservations about risking the (then) virtually unknown Scottish Fantasy, since the standard concerto to put on record with the Bruch had become the Mendelssohn, but the agreed feeling was that with a star of our soloist’s magnitude we could afford to take the risk,” Minshull wrote in an introduction for a re-issue of the recording in 1996.
“This confidence was not misplaced, and the works give her a wonderful opportunity to illustrate one of the features which to me, makes her most uncommon as a violinist she is able to draw from the lower three strings of the instrument a range of emotions which I have heard from no other.”
The SPO will also perform Mahler’s 1st symphony the “Titan” in the second half of the program, a piece that appeared on the orchestra’s second Deutsche Grammophon recording in November 2011.