String fever flares as Chloe comes to town

Chloe Hanslip just last month won the Young British Classical Performer award at the 2003 Classical BRIT Awards. Now, fresh from her triumph, the violinist comes to Asia for a concert tour.
Ms. Hanslip, 16, will be holding her first Seoul recital at 4 p.m. today at the Seoul Arts Center in southern Seoul. She will be accompanied by Roderick Chadwick on the piano.
The program includes Johannes Brahms’ Scherzo from his “Free but Lonely” sonata and his Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Mozart’s Adagio in E Major, Ravel’s Violin Sonata and Franz Waxmann’s “Carmen Fantasy.”
Ms. Hanslip last year was nominated for the BRIT Awards, the top classical music awards in the United Kingdom, but this was her first year to win. She was also nominated for BRIT’s 2003 Female Artist of the Year.
When she was 8, Itzhak Rashkovsky, a violin professor at the Royal College of Music in London, called her talent “rare and very precious.” By the age of 10, she had played at Carnegie Hall in New York and Royal Albert Hall in London.
Ms. Hanslip is the youngest artist ever to enter a contract with Warner Classics UK. She was a mere 13 years old when she signed on, but had long been acclaimed as a child prodigy.
Initially, at the invitation of Yehudi Menuhin, Ms. Hanslip studied with Natasha Boyarskaya at the Menuhin School. Ms. Hanslip’s next teacher was Zakhar Bron, a professor at the Lubeck Musikhochschules in Cologne. The music school consistently graduates world-class violinists, including the now famous Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin. Several of Chloe’s peers are Korean violinists.
Her 2001 album “Chloe,” recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Paul Mann, helped her nomination the next year for “Young Artist of the Year” at the Classical BRIT Awards. For her second album, a recording of Max Bruch’s Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 3, released in 2002, she worked again with the London Symphony Orchestra, this time conducted by Martyn Brabbins.
If ever a young artist could help classical music ― not cross-over, not world music ― flourish, Ms. Hanslip is that musician.

by Joe Yong-hee

For more information, call (02) 575-0426 or visit the Web site at www.ticketlink.co.kr. Tickets for the concert cost 20,000 to 70,000 won ($16.50-$58).