The Dallas Chamber Symphony named winners of its first Dallas International Violin Competition on Tuesday night, after each of three finalists played a violin concerto at Moody Performance Hall. Guest conductor Jim Stopher, chair of the music department at the College of Marin in California, led the DCS in the three concertos.
First prize, including a concerto performance next season with the DCS and a $2,500 cash award, went to Jaewon Wee. Wee also won the $500 Audience Choice award.
The $1,500 second prize was awarded to Sarah Ying Ma. Chaewon Kim received the $1,000 third prize.
The three jurors were violin professors from three Texas universities: Kirsten Yon from the University of Houston Moores School of Music, John Haspel Gilbert from the Texas Tech University School of Music and Patricia Shih from Baylor University.
Open to violinists 18 to 35, the new violin competition is expected to alternate with a piano competition the chamber orchestra started in 2013. (There’s discussion of adding a cello competition in the rotation.) Competitors were narrowed to the three finalists after two previous rounds: complete concertos performed with piano accompaniment, then 20 minute recitals of music for unaccompanied violin.
Given limited rehearsal time, competitors were asked to prepare standard repertory concertos. Each of the finalists played a major 20th century concerto, each with impressive authority.
With degrees from the Korea National University of the Arts and the Juilliard School and a diploma from the New England Conservatory, Wee plans to pursue a second performance diploma at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Her white-hot performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto certainly defied the cliche of this as cool Nordic music.
Her technical command was astonishing, from gutsy scrubbings and speed-of-light runs to sweet lyricism and pinpoint pianissimos on high. Just occasionally she pushed fast tempos a little too much, at some cost to clarity.
Ma also occasionally pressed fast tempos a little too much in the Prokofiev Concerto No. 2, but her impassioned account was gripping start to finish. She commanded that rarest of effects, pianissimos at the threshold of audibility that still radiated intensity. After studies at the Juilliard School, Ma is pursuing a double degree at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio.
Initially trained in her native South Korea, Kim holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School and is working on a second master’s from Yale University. I wondered if it was wise to pick the Bartók Second Concerto, not the easiest work for either orchestra or audience. Her throaty, viola-ish sound at the beginning certainly perked up the ears, but she also summoned lyricism when called for, and plenty of virtuosity in the finale.
Not until Saturday did the orchestra musicians learn which concertos they’d be playing, which made the generally assured and well-nuanced playing all the more impressive. Stopher’s unfailingly clear conducting must have been most helpful, and he always seemed to anticipate each violinist’s every timing.
But in three concertos meant for full symphony orchestras in large halls, sonic proportions were sometimes awry in a 750-seat hall that takes little sound to fill. With a chamber orchestra’s reduced string sections — and with a conductor with little experience of the hall — both solos and ensembles of winds and brasses were sometimes too prominent in balances.
