CMNW Spotlight Recital: Soovin Kim & Alexi Kenney

• Alexi Kenney, violin
• Zitong Wang, piano
• Soovin Kim, violin

This showcase recital will illuminate multi-award-winning violinist Alexi Kenney's masterful virtuosity and depth of expression with pianist Zitong Wang. Join us for a midday interlude of superbly performed Bach, Salina Fisher, and Eugène Ysaÿe.

About Chamber Music Northwest (CMNW)

Chamber Music Northwest serves more than 50,000 people annually in Oregon and SW Washington with exceptional chamber music through over 100 events annually, including our flagship Summer Festival, year-round concerts, community activities, educational programs, broadcasts, and innovative collaborations with other arts groups. CMNW is the only chamber music festival of its kind in the Northwest and one of the most diverse classical music experiences in the nation, virtually unparalleled in comparable communities.

Chamber Music Northwest's mission is to inspire our community through concerts and events celebrating the richness and diversity of chamber music, performed by artists of the highest caliber, presenting our community with exceptional opportunities for enjoyment, education, and reflection.

About Alexi Kenney, violin

Violinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs and commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras around the world, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of our time. Alexi is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award.

About Zitong Wang, piano

Award-winning Chinese pianist Zitong Wang made her solo recital debut at age 13 in the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing. She has performed at such venues as the Steinway Hall in New York, Verizon Hall in Philadelphia, and Severance Hall in Cleveland. She has appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Galicia Symphony Orchestra, Hangzhou Philharmonic, Yakima Symphony, and Waring Festival Orchestras. She has worked with conductors Jahja Ling, Xian Zhang, Lina Gonzalez-Granados, José Trigueros, and Yang Yang.

Among others, she won first prize in the Rosalyn Tureck International Bach Competition and Virginia Waring International Concerto Competition, second prize in the Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition, and first prize in the Princeton Festival Competition and France Music Competition. In 2022, she won first prize and the “Nelson Freire Prize” for the best performer of a piece by Frederick Chopin in the XXXIII Ferrol International Piano Competition.

About Soovin Kim, violin

Soovin Kim enjoys a broad musical career regularly performing Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, sonatas for violin and piano ranging from Beethoven to Ives, Mozart and Haydn concertos and symphonies as a conductor, and new world-premiere works almost every season. When he was 20 years old, Kim received first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition. He immersed himself in the string quartet literature for 20 years as the first violinist of the Johannes Quartet. Among his many commercial recordings are his “thrillingly triumphant” (Classic FM Magazine) disc of Paganini's demanding 24 Caprices, and a two-disc set of Bach's complete solo violin works that were released in 2022.

Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (LCCMF) in Burlington, Vermont. In addition to its explorative programming and extensive work with living composers, LCCMF created the ONE Strings program through which all third- through fifth-grade students of the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington study violin. The University of Vermont recognized Soovin Kim's work by bestowing an Honorary Doctorate upon him in 2015. In 2020, he and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, became Artistic Directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon. He, with Chien, were awarded Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's 2021 CMS Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music. Kim devotes much of his time to his passion for teaching at the New England Conservatory in Boston, and the Yale School of Music in New Haven.