Jinjoo Cho, the Gold Medalist of the 2014 Ninth Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, has an incredibly varied repertoire of violin concertos under her belt.
She’s learned plenty of works by some of the best known composers, including J.S. Bach, Bela Bartok, Johannes Brahms and Ludwig van Beethoven, but she also plays pieces by Dmitri Kabalevsky, Aram Khachaturian and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
When Cho performs with the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra & Chorus on March 19, she’ll showcase the challenging “Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 82” written by late 19th/early 20th century composer Alexander Glazunov.
A Russian composer, conductor and teacher who served as the director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory between 1905 and 1928 and taught Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Glazunov is best known for his ballets, later symphonies and his Violin Concerto.
“It’s a rich and warm piece with a texture that’s quite unique,” Cho explains during a recent phone interview. “It’s wonderfully virtuosic with so many melodies. Glazunov uses a lot of folk ideas to make it more personal for the audience.”
The winner of numerous awards including the First Prize and Orchestra Award at the Buenos Aires International Violin Competition in 2010, 2nd Laureate at the 2011 Isang Yun International Music Competition, First Grand Prize at the Alice Schoenfeld International String Competition and the Dorothy DeLay Award at Aspen Music Festival, Cho is also a dedicated teacher and educator.
Born in Seoul, Korea in 1988, Cho moved to Cleveland, Ohio at the age of 14 to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she earned a master’s degree. She continues to live in the Cleveland area and currently is on the faculties of the Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Cho founded a new chamber music program for high school and college students in Cleveland named ENCORE Chamber Music.
“It was such a special experience for me to study in Cleveland that I wanted to share the kind of training I received with young people in the area,” she says about starting ENCORE Chamber Music. “I had a team of teachers working with me. It was a very supportive environment. It really does take a village to teach music.”
The concert also features a performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 5,” which was written in 1901-1902 and was the composer’s first purely instrumental orchestral work since the writing of his first symphony in the 1880s.
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