Violinist Soovin Kim tackles multifaceted Bach works for festival

Violinist Soovin Kim is immersed in the partitas and sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Not only will he be in Spokane next week to perform Sonata No. 1 and Partitas 1 and 3 as part of the Northwest Bach Festival’s Twilight Tours program, he’s in the middle of recording all six solo violin works for an album to be released later this year.

Kim, who teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston and is a member of the Johannes String Quartet, said in a phone interview this week the Bach sonatas and partitas are among the most difficult works written for solo violin.

“There are other difficult things written for the violin, but what Bach demands out of the violin with his writing is very particular and in that way cannot be more difficult,” Kim said. “He tries to make the violin sound like many instruments. Many different kinds of instruments in different movements. It might sound like an organ in one movement, and like a lute in another. And then, famously, he’ll write these fugues where you’re trying to sound like three different instruments at once. And that’s not something the violin was meant to do, but Bach didn’t really care.”

Kim added that what’s truly amazing about these masterworks is that despite their inherent difficulty, they’re actually quite possible to perform.

“It’s one thing to have the imagination already to write the music that Bach wrote for violin,” he said. “To be able to compose it on the violin and make it playable is just mind-boggling and inconceivable. You talk to living composers today and they look at what Bach created, it seems inconceivable.”

Mastering these works is ultimately rewarding, Kim said, but it’s “always frightening to perform.”

Kim is the second festival guest artist to tackle the Bach solo violin pieces. Kurt Nikkanen kicked off the festival on Tuesday with a performance of Sonata No. 2. Nikkanen also performed the second and third partitas this week before handing the bow to Kim.

Also on the agenda for Kim’s visit to Spokane is an appearance in the Festival Finale on March 8, where he’ll perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano in C Major (nicknamed the Triple Concerto). Joining him will be festival artistic director Zuill Bailey on cello and pianist Awadagin Pratt – both longtime friends of Kim’s. Bailey and Kim met as young teenagers at a strings camp, while Pratt and Kim are old basketball buddies.

Playing the Beethoven is less daunting than the Bach Sonatas and Partitas, Kim said. Maybe because it features solo work for three instruments, the weight of the piece doesn’t fall on one musician, he said – although he added that the cello part is by far the most demanding of the three. Ultimately, Kim said it’s a fun piece to play.

“Considering how glorious the music is, it is actually much easier than, for instance, playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which is also glorious music, but is so much more demanding,” he said, “or for a pianist to play Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, it’s just a monumental feat to play those.”

Working toward playing these difficult violin works has been something Kim’s been at since he was 3 years old, when he first asked his parents for a violin. He started lessons at age 4.

“It was always the violin, apparently,” he said. “Now as an adult and a teacher I can very much feel that I made the right choice in an instrument. The violin is a soprano instrument and my ear is very much drawn to those soprano sounds.”

He added, “As a 3-year-old, I made the right choice.”