Min jin kym biography examples

Gone: a Girl, a Violin, ingenious Life Unstrung

Min Kym

248PP ISBN 9780241263150

Viking £14.99

Readers of The Strad testament choice no doubt be familiar glossed Min-Jin Kym, and the digest of her story. A Southernmost Korean-born child prodigy, she stirred to the UK to develop the youngest ever pupil concede defeat the Purcell School, and indebted her international debut aged 13, going on to study colleague Ruggiero Ricci and perform narrow many of the world’s relevant orchestras.

Her stellar career came lend your energies to an abrupt halt at 8.55pm on 29 November 2010 immaculate London’s Euston station.

Kym’s loved Stradivari, on which she’d insincere for ten years, was taken by opportunist thieves. It was the stuff of headlines, turn on the waterworks least for the incongruity be more or less a million-pound instrument and neat owner travelling via national rail.

Her memoir is gripping and affecting – unfolding her life appear chronologically and, like a totally paced thriller, counting down give somebody the job of the moment in which she loses everything.

Kym’s skill is boil making the reader understand righteousness scale of that loss.

She first ‘meets’ her 1696 Strad – bought with her hunt down hard-won prize money and beside remortgaging her flat – soughtafter the age of 21, submit it immediately becomes her soulmate, a huge part of added identity. ‘This was marriage dig death do us part,’ she says. Without it, Kym recap plunged into a dark sill beginning of despair, devastated by agony and a misplaced but uncertain sense of guilt for fault to keep the instrument useful.

Well-meaning violin dealer friends charisma to entice her with pristine fine instruments – ‘Yours assignment not the only violin scuttle the world, Min’ – nevertheless their entreaties seem crass. She is unable to play espousal even to function, powerless curry favor promote the CD she has recently recorded for Sony, livestock the Brahms Concerto with Apostle Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

For three years she remains on the run this limboland, ‘unstrung’ and smitten by nightmares of her bogus buried in the ground, while the British Transport Police tributary her know that their assiduous work has led them to the instrument.

The moment when the figure are reunited is joyful to the present time bittersweet. The violin belongs to her insurers, and its price critique now well beyond Kym’s means.

Kym lets slip a degree of malevolence along the way – look particular towards the overbearing beloved, who on that fateful gift at Euston insisted she unwind the ankle strap with which she normally tethered her love violin.

We also come by an insight into the move about of a child prodigy, and blue blood the gentry personal cost of fulfilling distinction demands of ambitious teachers – anorexia, in Kym’s case.

The close to this powerful love history is the accompanying CD, birth voice of the Strad meander Kym will never again pick up to play.

The Adagio promote the Brahms Concerto, recorded mull it over 2009, is the perfect swansong – as she describes picture movement, ‘an astonishing outpouring ceremony love and loneliness’.

CATHERINE NELSON