Interview with David Kim, Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra

WILLIAM: Hi and welcome to the Music Share Young Artist Program Series Viewpoint. Today I have the honor and pleasure to talk with David Kim, who is the Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1999. David started playing the violin at the age of three and began studies with the famed pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the age of eight. That's a long time, David. He later received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Juilliard School. Highlights from his 2019-20 season include appearing as soloists with the Philadelphia Orchestra, teaching performance residencies and master classes at the University of Texas at Austin, the Manhattan School of Music. Bob Jolie goes on and on and on and on and on because he's done so, so much. Oh. He also has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Eastern University in suburban Philly and the University of Rhode Island and Dickinson College. Those are important things as well. His instruments, and this is where we really, really get into it, his instruments are a Guadagnini from Milan, and it was from 1757. And it's all known from the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Michelangelo Bergonzi from Cremona 1754. So he's got those two beautiful, beautiful instruments. And so with that, welcome David Kim.

DAVID: Thank you. Thank you so much, Bill. I just have to interrupt you right away and tell you a story. When I first went to Aspen, I was 10 years old, and so that was about 1973 with my mom. And we, you know, of course my mom was a musician and we went to everything that was offered in terms of performances, masterclasses, we went to everything. But one performance totally, I still remember it and we talked about it until the day she died. And that was you playing Sibelius concerto in 1973 with piano. And it was just something I'll never forget.

WILLIAM: Wow.

DAVID: Yeah.

WILLIAM: Wow. I'm so honored to hear that. Thank you.

DAVID: Oh, no, no. I still remember to this day. And so I just always admire your playing and artistry and what you're doing now. So this is a great honor for me. So thank you so much for inviting me.

WILLIAM: It's our pleasure. So with that, let me ask you a question. When did you decide that you wanted to be an orchestral musician? Did you want it to be a concert master?

DAVID: Well, like many young people throughout different generations, and it happens all the time to this day, I ask young people, what are you thinking of doing? Where would you like to be in five years or 10 years? And so many of them say, well, I'd like to be a soloist. And so, of course, if you're in that whole Juilliard, Curtis, Dorothy DeLay kind of world, it's something that you think about, you dream about, and desire so much. And in some cases, I have to be honest that many people said, oh, yeah, it's kind of a given. You're going to get there. When I was a child, and prodigy was a word that was thrown about. You know, when I got through my 20s, I was so naive. I didn't see the writing on the wall. I didn't understand that the less and less that I played in terms of number of solo concerts, invitations received, travel calls from important conductors, etc. That was not really happening, but I was so naive, I just thought, oh, that's going to happen any day. But finally, when I had an epiphany, I think I was like 31 or 32 years old, way too late. And it was then that I decided, OK, you gotta get a job, you gotta earn a paycheck, you have to support your wife. We didn't have kids yet. And that was the beginning of an absolute about face. It happened literally overnight. I literally went, at that time we were living north of New York City, I took Metro North down,. Into the city to a place called Tower Records. It was a place where you could go and buy CDs. And I bought like a thousand dollars worth of all the standard repertoire. And I just started listening. Before I did anything, I just started listening to Brahms 4 and La Mer and Ein Heldenleben, Don Juan, you know, I could go on and on.

WILLIAM: Yeah. Yeah. Well... I'm sure you get asked this question a lot, but are there steps that one needs to do to prepare for an audition for an orchestral situation? Are there things that are important to understand, shall I say? About that preparation?

DAVID: Well, I think without question, at least I'm sure there are many different ways to approach trying to win an orchestral position, but at least my approach, which I undertook at that time when I was about 31, 32. And it seems to be kind of the pattern that basically everybody has to do, and that is, first of all, you just have to really spend the hours learning your orchestral. You can't just say, oh, I'm just going to kind of know the stuff and get to know them. And then I can, you know, I can go into the audition and handle these things. You have to kind of, there's a certain something through that big screen, that curtain, we can sense when we're listening from the other side, if somebody is just green or they've never played this particular work in an orchestra on stage with, you know, kind of a serious or there's something. Kind of there's something that comes through the screen if they're supposed to be playing something with the horn section, but they have no idea, they're kind of playing as kind of gypsy rhythm. And so one of the things is you really have to spend the sacrificial hours learning all that stuff. So it feels like even if it's not necessarily stuff that you've been playing your whole life, it just, you can fool them. The other thing is you must get good coaching. It's something that I right away started with Anshul Brusilov, who was one of the great concert masters of all time of the Philadelphia Orchestra in the sixties and seventies. Glenn Dichterot at that time, the legendary concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. I just went to a lot of people, Roberto Diaz, who was the principal viola of the Philadelphia Orchestra at that time, now president of Curtis Institute of Music. I just went to not everybody that I could possibly find and play and kind of get confused, but really go to a few people that I really valued their opinion.

WILLIAM: I'm sorry, were there elements? You mentioned rhythm. Would you say that rhythm having a context, or what about pitch?

DAVID: How does... Well, all of those things, a lot of times young people don't know exactly what the expectations are. And so they ask me questions like, well, what kind of pitch or rhythm are you looking for? And really the answer, the simple answer is we're just looking for the basic solid good playing. Play in tune, play with good rhythm. You know, it doesn't have to be anything out of the ordinary, really. We're just looking for a beautiful sound. Those basically three or four things, sound, rhythm, intonation has to be solid, not too sharp, not too flat. Musicality has to be kind of just very easy to embrace, uncomplicated. All these things, basically you have to imagine, do I wanna sit with that person for the next 30 years? And if the answer is yes, mission accomplished. It's pretty simple. There's no secret formula.

WILLIAM: That's great. So to get to this point, did you study from books of orchestral excerpts? There are lots of, I know, even me who never really set foot in an orchestra, I looked at, there were three books that I looked at of orchestral excerpts when I was young. Did you do that?

DAVID: Well, you know, those, they're published by International, probably, maybe they're by Gingold, he accumulated.

WILLIAM: Exactly, exactly.

DAVID: Incredible, yeah. But I kind of, right off the bat, realized that I needed help. I couldn't just depend on Mr. Gingold to give me bowings and fingerings. I wanted kind of a broad kind of palette and be able to go through and kind of figure out, ah, okay, I'm gonna... It seems like this fingering in this run in Don Juan is one that kind of is dependable under pressure. And so I started calling in favors and I asked a lot of people who are already in orchestras, hey, is there any way that you could send me a copy of your Don Juan? Or is there any way that you could scan or send me something like that, a PDF of something. And then once I had a kind of a good library, I had a good stack, then I contacted Calmus and I started ordering brand new parts. You can just order one violin part. And then I made my own addition. I would take all the bowings that I considered, and the ones that I liked best, and the ones that seemed kind of more median, kind of typical bowings and fingerings. I didn't want to go too far off the beaten track. Then I made them, put them into my own part, and then bound them into a beautiful three-ring bonder. And mark them with colored labels and everything. So I wanted to be really ready for anything so that it's really nice when you take an orchestral audition, you can take your own parts in there. It's like cheating on a test. It's an amazing asset. So I had my own fingerings, my own bowings, I had my own. This is going to psych me up if I put this one word at the beginning. This is going to keep me from rushing if I put this one word here or one phrase, and I would put some colored markings in. You know, not overdoing it, but those things helped me to succeed eventually, even though it took me a little while to kind of sift through everything and realize, ah, this doesn't really work. Better switch to this, you know, that kind of thing.

WILLIAM: Wow. So, I'm curious. This may be a silly question, but do you use your book when you play in the orchestra with your stand partner?

DAVID: Well, no, because now I've been in the orchestra for 21 years and we've gone through, of course, all of the standard, especially the concertmaster solos. I'm a real writer. It's kind of a sin in some orchestras. You don't want to write because people are rotating their seating and switching stand partners and sometimes it's like really bad orchestral etiquette. But I'm fortunate because I'm always sitting on the first stand, my own part, year after year, now, decade after decade, and so I have the same part that I see every time. Say I haven't played Missa Solemnis by Beethoven in... 13 years, but at least I have a starting point, and we're playing it this coming season. And I look at it, and of course I'll make changes. I play a little differently. Maybe I use my fourth finger just a little bit more now than I used to. You know, the little changes like that. Excuse me, for one thing, my dog is scratching at the door. I have to let her... Okay, come on. Come on. There she goes. Okay. And then my stand partners realize that that's what I need to do and they are so kind. Nobody ever erases even one comma or dot or anything. They know if my initials are in the top right-hand corner. They leave all the markings, and I, of course, try not to overdo it and write too much in, but it sure saves a lot of time the next time we come around. Sometimes I don't even remember having played it. I'll say, whoa, look at this. We played this piece by De Falla or something, and those are my markings. Oh, how thoughtful.

WILLIAM: Wow. So when you come back to that marking, do you change things? You know, look at it and go, how could I have done this one?

DAVID: Why does that happen? And many conductors are very... Even though they're not violinists, they're so well-versed in violin technique and string crossings and colors and positions and slides. And it's amazing. And many times, like my music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, he will ask me for stuff all the time. He won't even ask. He'll just look over and he'll say, ah, that's sharp. Or he'll look over and he'll say, no, no, no, like this, like, oh, let's go up on the D string. And I'm always amazed. It's just, these guys, they really, they're paid well for a reason. And so I'll change markings and if I don't like it, I'll put, this is my little secret, many of us, I'll put the initials of the conductor next to the marking. Kind of that's a signal that I don't like the change, so meaning I'll erase it perhaps after their week is finished and I'll go back to my old thing, at least that'll be my baseline.

WILLIAM: Wow, that's incredible. So, okay, let's move back to these auditions for a second. With auditions, we are required or the auditioner is required to do a concerto. Do you have a list of concertos that you think are appropriate for this kind of an audition or not appropriate?

DAVID: Yes, I do. That's a terrific question, Bill, because it's a question that I get so often. And what I have seen kind of evolve in the orchestral world, at least in Philadelphia, but it seems to be happening a little bit in other orchestras as well. They don't just, usually it's one romantic concerto, complete, and then usually Mozart concerto maybe first movement but we used to make it any Mozart concerto and then somebody would play Mozart G major number three and you just got that little bit of feeling like. Okay, it's a little easier than D major, A major, so, hmm. Like, they don't get a strike against them, but it's just a little like, hmm, I wonder why they chose that one. And then, same with romantic concertos. We don't leave it completely open anymore, because what if somebody comes, maybe, with a little concerto? Or even maybe Mendelssohn could be considered slightly less hefty. So usually we give a list that includes Bartok, B minor, Tchaikovsky Brahms, Sibelius, and those are the three, of course, that are played the most. And then Barber comes up quite often, Glasunov, sometimes Dvorak, but it's very dangerous for the going up to the high notes in the early part. But from my experience, Bill, what I have found is that, the really great players the ones that you look on their resume later and you're like holy cow i never could have beaten this person they have major wins and all these you know they're like they won Queen Elizabeth and they won this and they won that um they can play any concerto but people who are perhaps more like us like mortals like us, I find that Brahms concerto can be problematic. The first page is just somehow a little dangerous. If you're not completely warmed up, comfortable, relaxed, it can be a little bit scratchy. You get 10 minutes with the house pianist. Can be a little bit difficult to match up, you know, the quintuplets and the sextuplets. So I find Bramhs just a little dangerous. I find Sibelius very good, but it's kind of like Bach. That first paragraph can be, people can be on the committee, can be. Quite dogmatic and quite opinionated about the way they think it should go. One person may think, oh, this should be ice cold and Nordic, and the next person's like, oh, no, this is like fire. So it can perhaps be a little bit controversial. And then I think what works really well is Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky, you can just kind of come out. You don't have to really reinvent the wheel. You just come out, you nail it. And nobody really can win an audition with their concerto, but they certainly can lose it, I think. If they come out and really fall in their face with their concerto, I think it really puts hesitation in our minds before we even start the excerpts. But if they play really a solid, let's say, first two pages of Sibelius, then I'm thinking to myself, I'm looking at myself in the mirror like, okay, could we hear some excerpts, please? And I'm already like, okay, listening a little differently. Like, okay, this person is super violinist, super solid, cool as a cucumber. They nailed first two pages of Sibelius. Now, let's see if they understand orchestral culture.

WILLIAM: Wow. That's really fascinating. So, okay. I have another perhaps silly question.

DAVID: Nothing. Nothing is silly.

WILLIAM: To prepare for all of what you do, do you still play scales?

DAVID: I'm not a big scale person. I only play a major scale and in the same rhythms that Ms. DeLay gave me from my childhood. I started as you mentioned earlier when I was eight years old and so we spent. The first three or four years just building technique. I kind of learned a lot of repertoire, but just to check it off. I spent so much of my time doing scales and Yost and Sevcik and Kreutzer and don't and sit and all that stuff. It's kind of something that I just cringe when I even think about it, but I'm certainly eager to encourage other young people to incorporate those things in their daily practice, at least at some point in their life. I don't believe that any of us are really capable of this kind of sacrificial technique practice and then unaccompanied Bach and then you know learn a concerto and then do your chamber music like this kind of five six hours a day for their whole lives I mean I feel like there are times in their lives like maybe they fall in love and they're oh my gosh I really haven't done enough practicing because I've been in Central Park rowing on the boat with my new boyfriend you know like there's times things change in our lives or maybe you had a little shoulder problem and so you had to kind of ease off for a year or six months or something. So my feeling is you do have to spend at some portion of your life, you do have to do that kind of hard technical work with all those etudes and method books that I mentioned. But at my stage, I'm 57 now, if I find that, as long as I'm practicing something that's difficult, it gives me plenty of technique work and it's kind of a good combination of violin push-ups, sit-ups, and dental flossing. So, for instance, during this whole COVID I've been pretty good about practicing. And this is saying something because I really dislike practicing, but every day I practice the Beethoven Violin Concerto cover to cover. Basically I play through and if I need to practice stuff I do. And then also from the thirds to the end of the Carmen Fantasy, kind of under tempo, really in tune, kind of nailing it. And every day I do that, and I feel like that helps me with scales, arpeggios, thirds. You know, it's kind of like going through Carl Flesh, but you're doing it with music. And even when the orchestra is playing normally, if I'm very busy, but I have a concerto coming up. Even while I'm playing in the orchestra, I will kind of almost mentally practice while I'm playing Brahms Second Symphony. Like I won't just sit there and just play the Brahms Second Symphony as a member of the first violin section. I will play with intensity and try to vibrate every note, or I will try to make sure that I don't reach up there, that I get around. You know, like I'm thinking violinistically, and I find that those things help me to be in good shape at all times, whether I'm not so busy like right now, or when I'm super busy, like before COVID.

WILLIAM: That's really, really, really interesting. Sort of this idea of like doing concerto scales, you know, of pulling or extracting from the repertoire that you're doing, be it concertos, be orchestral, be quartets or whatever, but pulling from that and finding those passages that you can treat in the same way that you treated the scales, or you can refresh yourself or your feeling in the same way. I'm really fascinated by that. That's really, really cool.

DAVID: Well, but then there was also a time when I was like in my twenties when I was going to a lot of international competitions and as everybody knows in the first round usually they asked for two Paganini Caprices and Bach. And so at that time, whether I was preparing for a competition or not, for me I was not doing Sitt and Yost and Gavinies' and all that. I was every day I would practice Paganini Caprices, 17, 24 and Bach A minor unaccompanied sonata, especially the fugue. And when I finished practicing those, some days it would take me 45 minutes, some days it would take me half an hour. But as long as I felt that kind of fatigue in my left hand, I felt satisfied, like, okay, I did my violin push-ups, sit-ups, and dental flossing today.

WILLIAM: But you didn't overdo. So it was like you were really aware of what it felt like in your hands. You know, you were responding, reacting to that, I guess.

DAVID: Right. Right. And some days I might practice those particular works. And I might do the same with Beethoven Violin Concerto nowadays or Carmen Fantasy. I might also do super slow practicing and trying to absolutely kind of do slow motion practicing where I feel myself going, ascending to the higher position, making sure that my pinky doesn't curl, which it tends to do, making sure that my bow stays straight, which I'm more prone to the windshield wiper method. So all these bad habits, which never go away. They're always kind of close by. I'm always trying to monitor them, whether it's practicing super slow, slow motion, in tempo, if I'm a little short on time, just a run through, maybe set up my phone, just a little bit of making sure that my intonation is not creeping up. Listening is always a great thing. I hate doing it, but so helpful.

WILLIAM: I'm curious, what app do you use to check if your intonation is going up or down? Do you use a particular app?

DAVID: I use my ear. I find that. It's not so much that I find myself, everything is in general like 20% too high or 10% sharp or even 2%, but I start to hear certain notes kind of project their head up, like they come up and then like, it's like whack-a-mole, like the head comes up and like a note is high or I'll shift up. And I think a lot of us are guilty of that kind of... It makes the violin kind of spin a little bit when we play sharp. We like that kind of zing in the sound, but then we get kind of stuck in that kind of slightly sharpish sound world. And then you're in trouble because then, especially for me, if I'm on stage and Yannick looks over at me and says, sharp, it's sharp. I mean, I have to be able to, it could be in the middle of a recording session for Deutsche Gramophone. He might look over and say... You know, and so I have to be able to absolutely change on the spot. And so I'm constantly guarding against that. And so for the first half of COVID, I tuned to like 436. You know, I was just trying very hard to recondition my ear because I have a tendency, my ear has a tendency to go up, but you never know. Everybody's different.

WILLIAM: Do you tune in the orchestra to 440, 441, 4...

DAVID: 440. Our official A is 440, but you know, that's best effort. I can hear it around. I can hear myself sometimes the oboist. I'll look at the oboist, smile, and they'll give the A, and then I hear like, I can hear A's around me already creeping up. I can hear myself creeping up. So what I do to combat against that is before I walk on stage, I make sure that I'm tuned to 440. And then when I walk on stage, no matter what A the oboist gives me, it might be a millimeter off. It might be this much. I will pretend to adjust, but I won't adjust. I keep it at 440 no matter what, because the tuning period before the conductor walks out is very short. So if all of a sudden, yaw, and my pegs slip, I'm dead. So I want to keep it at 440, so I come out and I pretend like I'm tuning and adjusting, but I'm not touching anything.

WILLIAM: That's wild. So OK. Could I ask you, who has studied with Ms. DeLay from such an early age, what was it like when you were young, studying with her? How was she with you?

DAVID: She was like my favorite grandmother or my favorite aunt or my favorite school teacher. She was so just enchantingly kind and warm and she and my mother team taught me basically. I started with Ms. DeLay, we lived near Pittsburgh, so once a month my parents would drive me across to Sarah Lawrence College where Ms. DeLay taught on Sundays and I would take a two-hour lesson once a month and then when I was 10 we moved to South Carolina and from there I would fly every other week and take a one-hour lesson but my mother would confer with Miss Delay and take copious notes. And my mother was the opposite of Miss Delay, super intense, yelling, screaming. It was hell on earth. And so it was so nice to go to Miss Delay and have her call me sugarplum and sweetie pie and give me the... Like, oh, where did that come from? That beautiful trill that you just did and, you know, like all that stuff. So I think part of her magic was that we all just wanted that praise. We wanted that encouragement and just like, affirmation and just the love. We all adored her because we all had neurotic, pushy, crazy parents in the background, neurotically hoping that our kid would be the next.

WILLIAM: When you got older, did that change or did it pretty much stay that way with the scarf and the glasses? I don't know, did she...

DAVID: Pretty much. I would say that she was absolutely the same in terms of that warmth and kindness and accessibility and all that, but. You know, she just, she was amazing. She knew how to teach an eight-year-old kid. And then she also knew how to teach me after I had finished bachelor's degree, master's degree. And I would just come back to her once every four months for a little tune-up session or a little boost. And she could talk to me at that point. And she just knew how to speak to us without speaking down to us. Never condescending, never, well, you know, she was just, she was the best. And, but I think we all also, we were a little competitive, all of us, we all wanted whatever it was that Ms DeLay had to offer.

WILLIAM: Yeah, I remember from my time with her, I remember that whenever she was happy with what I was doing, it was always, oh, sweetie, oh, sugarplum, oh Billy and whenever she was not happy was William.

DAVID: I remember that. I was like thinking to myself at that time like she calls him Billy why doesn't she call me Davey or something? I remember her calling you Billy.

WILLIAM: That's really great.

DAVID: We were so fortunate.

WILLIAM: Oh god yes. I so, so thank you for sharing and giving us a little more insight into what goes on when one is a concert master of a great orchestra like the Philadelphia Orchestra and the kinds of things that one goes through. To maintain one's discipline or goes through to even get to that place. It's been really, really a wonderful thing to hear your journey. I'm so happy to have participated in that.

DAVID: Thank you, Bill. Thank you. It's a great honor to be here and speak with you. And thank you so much for inviting me.

WILLIAM: Well, thank you.

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