The fantabulous violinist Karen Gomyo join forces with the Oregon Symphony to perform the Beethoven Violin Concerto this week. Get to know her a bit more!
Violinist Karen Gomyo
Some random tidbits about Karen:
About the Beethoven Violin Concerto: I tried to stay away from the Beethoven Violin Concerto when I was younger. I learned it (went through a phase learning all the major concertos) and performed it a few times but quickly felt that I wanted to leave it and put it off to the side and come back to it when I was a little older. That’s what’s happening now. It has been a little over five years since years since I last played it.
It’s a masterpiece that you just take your time, you can spend a lifetime experiencing the piece, constantly seeing something new about it. Now that I am practicing it again, I am noticing the challenges the piece brings. Even studying the urtext score there’s several different versions… it’s so wonderfully monumental. This is the kind of challenge that keeps an artist forever curious and interested in music.
Special nuevo tango project: I grew up in Montreal where I heard a lot of Spanish around me. I spent a lot of time with my teen babysitter, my best friend in elementary school and their families who all spoke Spanish. I heard Piazzolla for the first time when I was 14. My mother and her friends once heard Piazzolla live at a smoky bar when he came to Montreal and she just really enjoyed the performance. She picked up Piazzolla’s CD Zero Hour for me, which Piazzolla claimed to be his best recording accomplishment. It was the first time I heard Piazzolla’s music and I absolutely fell in love with it. I was fascinated by the complexity, actually, because up until then, the Latin music I heard was really fun, but not the type of music you actually sit down and listen to. A few years later, I was at a summer festival to perform some of Piazzolla’s arrangements with other musicians. And when I saw Pablo Ziegler himself walk on stage my jaw fell to the floor. He and I connected and spoke about doing some project. We’re finally embarking on this project in 2012.
How Karen chose the violin: I’m from a non-musical family. But my mom, a visual artist, enjoyed jazz piano. I was humming tunes before I could speak words, so she considered music for me. Because she didn’t know so much about music and instruments she thought the piano would be the most expensive instrument because of its size and the amount of wood it uses. So she started considering smaller instruments. Around the same time fourteen-year old Midori came to town to play with the Montreal Symphony. My mother brought me to that concert. Of course I was blown away by that performance and I decided that I wanted to play the violin.
On chemistry between the player and violin instrument: I’ve had the Strad violin for ten years. I don’t own it. A generous sponsor gave me a budget to look for a violin. Prior to this violin, I never had my own instrument. I had to constantly skip from one borrowed violin, to the next (sometimes every week or every other week). I didn’t know what it meant to get to know an instrument.
Chemistry that the player and instrument has is so obvious when it does happen. One Strad worked really well in someone else’s hands but it didn’t work well for me. You realize that it’s like dealing with people. They (violins) might all be very good people, but you might connect with one over the another.
About the Strad Karen uses: There’s no history of an important player playing it, but in the last century it’s been in the hands of two owners. So it’s well protected and sheltered and very well-loved. This is the feeling that I got when I first played this instrument. It hadn’t been played that much. It’s a completely different violin than it was ten years ago. It’s a special experience to grow with an instrument on a daily basis. It really is complex it has its very strong personality and quirks. Sometimes it really tells you what it wants.
