Claire Bourg, violin
Inah Chiu, piano
(Violin Senior division Second Place and Best Interpretation 12/10/2011)
YouTube Posting (Unlisted)
video length 2 min 57 sec
Lutkin Hall, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL USA
Jan 8, 2012
Claire Bourg, 16, is a scholarship recipient and member of the Music Institute of Chicago’s Senior Academy program for gifted pre-college musicians, where she studies privately with MIC artist faculty member Cyrus Forough. She is a junior at Metea Valley High School in Aurora, Illinois.
Claire began studying the violin at age five and is currently a principal violinist for the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra and concertmistress of the Metea Valley Chamber Strings Orchestra. Claire has received many awards and accolades for her playing and was recently awarded first prize in the Confucius Competition.
In 2011, she was selected to perform with the Chicago Youth in Music Festival orchestra under the direction of Riccardo Muti and her string quartet was selected to perform onstage with Yo-Yo Ma at Chicago’s Symphony Center. Claire has performed as a featured soloist in many camps and festivals including the Bowdoin International Music Festival and the Indiana University Summer Strings Academy. She has participated in master classes led by the Ying Quartet and the Beethoven Project Trio.
In her spare time, Claire enjoys playing golf, traveling, teaching violin and performing in community outreach concerts.
Misook Kim received her B.A. with the honor of Cum Laude from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. After finishing her “New Star Concert” sponsored by the Cho-sun Newspaper, she entered the graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin where she completed her M.M. and D.M.A. degrees in composition and the certificate of piano performance. Reviewer Mike Greenberg, writing in the San Antonio Express-News, called the composer ‘a bold and unrepentant modernist’. He also has mentioned ‘each of her works presented thus far has impressed with its fearless modernism, its concision and its strong individual profile’.
Kim has performed as a composer as well as a pianist in various concerts of her own works from solo to larger ensemble compositions throughout the States and Korea. Including commissions for the MUSICOPIA Concert, Olmos Ensemble, she has won International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) Judith Zaimont Award and the Long Island Arts Council International Composition Competition in 2007. She was a former faculty member at The University of the Incarnate Word and Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She had also served as a music director at KUMC. In Fall 2006, Kim joined the faculty at the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College, IL. JOY of Ong-He-Ya (third place winner of the 2008 Sejong Music Composition Competition) is based on the Korean traditional folk tune, ‘Pori-Tajak Sori’, a barley threshing song from Kyung-Sang Province. The thematic elements are derived from the simple interval of a major 2nd, minor/major 3rd and perfect 4th. These two short motivic ideas, ‘Ong-He-Ya’ and ‘Uh-Jul-Shi-Gu’, keep repeating and developing as a call and response between violin and piano. A delightful rhythmic motif personifying Korean traditional folk-tunes continues in different registers and instruments. Throughout the piece this simple and clear musical material interacts with a happy theme, representing the joyful and exciting Korean folk song. |
