She starts with subtraction. In front of a score everyone thinks they know down to the semiquaver – Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto – Bomsori Kim argues that the impulse to add, to make it “new”, usually pushes the music away from itself. “If you try to sound novel by design, it becomes odd,” she says. “Very often, the simplest way is the best.”
The principle will be tested publicly this autumn when Bomsori steps on stage with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time, plays Mendelssohn with them in Seoul, and then takes the same programme across the ocean to Carnegie Hall on the orchestra’s US tour. Two years ago, a Beethoven concerto had been sketched with the orchestra but came to nothing; this time, at Music Director Jaap van Zweden’s suggestion, Mendelssohn was chosen.
“It feels different to debut and immediately tour together,” she adds. “The relationship with an orchestra changes when you travel side by side.” What makes it more personal is the fact of a first meeting at last: she grew up listening to this band from the audience and now, finally, will “speak to them on stage”.
Mendelssohn dispenses with a prelude, plants the cadenza in the middle, and ties three movements into one breath. Success, for Bomsori, is decided in bar one. “The real question is whether you can pull the hall into that world from the start. Other concertos give you time to warm up. This one doesn’t.” When she says “simple”, she does not mean “bland”. She means persuasive. It’s the discipline of trusting grammar over ornament: refusing to over‑paint a phrase and, instead, setting down the one note that is most truthful in the moment – clearly enough to carry a musical argument on its own.
The collaboration promises to be quick on its feet. Bomsori has worked several times with van Zweden elsewhere and values the exchange. “He’s a violinist by training – he hears every note and every rest – and he catches my gesture immediately. The response is fast. That makes everything comfortable, and fun.” Speed alters the equilibrium of interpretation: when the orchestra answers inside a beat, a soloist’s on‑the‑spot decisions can meet the ensemble’s pulse without delay. Bomsori calls that junction “freedom”.
Recent work in Bamberg has hardened her instinct for that kind of freedom. With Jakub Hrůša and the Bamberger Symphoniker she performed – and recorded – Bruch and Korngold; what surprised her was how audible a house sound can remain in a globalised century. Cities and their habits hold their tuning. “Bamberg itself is so well preserved – I believe it’s a UNESCO city. It’s small, quiet, the old things are still there. The orchestra has a colour shaped by its Czech lineage, and meeting a Czech conductor brought a particular energy.” Instead of imitating a local tint, she learned to place her own timbre “next to it, like a conversation”.
Studio and stage, in her experience, remake each other. “There’s usually more than a year between recording and performance. I learn in between, and I change. Honestly, even if the concerts are on consecutive days, the playing changes.” The real difference between album and concert, she suggests, is not “format” but “moment”: the same person, the same paper, yet a different occasion – therefore a different performance. And an orchestra is never the same twice either, even when it is the same orchestra; it is always “that day’s people”.
Tools matter, and how you hold them. Bomsori plays a 1725 Guarneri del Gesù, the ‘ex‑Moller’, on generous loan from the Samsung Foundation of Culture. “It has a core and power.” Peter Infeld (PI) strings on G, D and A; a Rondo Gold E most days, an Olive E when the situation asks for it. She sometimes switches to a full Rondo Gold set. People often tell her the sound reaches the very back of the hall; the point, she says, is not decibels but the recognisable outline of a tone – projection as quality rather than quantity. Good sound begins, for her, in daily renewal rather than fixed habit.
In her first year at university she essentially rebuilt bow‑arm and tone production from the ground up. “For almost a year I worked only on open strings and scales.” Every new stage resets the search for the posture that is most natural and makes the instrument speak most easily. Practice is the name she gives that search. “I try to live in a good posture, always. I keep moving towards whatever position makes the sound easiest.” Any gesture – however elegant – that introduces noise into the tone is simply discarded. The criterion is not complicated.
Which is another way of saying that interpretation is persuasion. How do you make a much‑played piece persuasive without artificial novelty? How do you persuade an orchestra and a conductor to make it with you? She starts by emptying out. “I’m thinking hard about how to show myself most truthfully.” The more famous the piece, the more she removes rather than adds.
Even the week’s diary reflects that ethic. In London a few days ago she made a broadcast recording – not an album – and inside a pre‑set format she still tried to leave a trace of who she was that day. Recordings are not replicas of concerts, nor are concerts live enactments of records. What crosses between the two is not the paper but the person, and people change daily.
All of which returns her to the first bar: a simple, persuasive breath; a gesture the orchestra cannot help but answer. A sentence that pulls an audience in at once: that is what she plans to show in Seoul and then abroad. State the first sentence clearly, and let the rest grow out of it. On the path Mendelssohn left, she wants to answer with the courage not to over‑paint.
That path runs straight through 57th and Seventh Avenue. On 27th October 2025, the Seoul Philharmonic appears at Carnegie Hall under van Zweden in Carnegie Hall’s own subscription season, with Bomsori in the Mendelssohn, framed by Jung Jae‑il’s Inferno (its US premiere) and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. It is 18 years since the orchestra’s first New York appearance in 2007, and the orchestra marks its return to the Hall as part of the Carnegie Hall Presents series.
That last point is not a mere technicality. Korean orchestras have played at Carnegie Hall before, but they have typically self‑presented or appeared through outside promoters. By contrast, the 27th October concert sits within the venue’s own ‘Presents’ orchestral season. After an 18‑year absence from New York, the difference between hiring the hall and being invited into the season matters: the latter implies curatorial selection and alignment with the Hall’s exacting artistic standards, placing the Seoul Philharmonic alongside the peer group of orchestras the Hall itself programmes each year. By my count, that makes this the first time a Korean orchestra has been programmed in Carnegie Hall’s own subscription series – a quiet but telling milestone in Korea’s classical story.
From New York the tour moves on to the McKnight Center for the Performing Arts at Oklahoma State University, where the orchestra plays two concerts (30th October and 1st November). One programme again sets Bomsori in Mendelssohn alongside Donghoon Shin’s Upon His Ghostly Solitude and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony; the other features the young Busoni‑winner Jaehong Park in Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. (Park also performs a Rachmaninov in a chamber programme with members of the orchestra on 29th October.)
When I ask about van Zweden’s choice of Mendelssohn after their planned Beethoven fell through, she becomes reflective. “The first sentence is decided; the rest is listening.” Bomsori considers the weeks ahead: Seoul concerts that launch the partnership, Carnegie’s weighty return after 18 years, the unfamiliar intimacy of touring with an orchestra she’s long admired from the audience. “I keep asking myself how to be most truthful,” she says. “With Mendelssohn, that means trusting what’s already there – not adding, but revealing.”
She returns once more to that exposed opening, the solo violin’s entry that will test her principle in three cities. “State it clearly. Let the hall quiet around it. Then listen to what grows.”
Bomsori Kim performs with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra at Seoul Arts Centre on 1st–2nd October, and at Carnegie Hall on 27th October. The US tour continues until 1st November.
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This article was sponsored by Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.