Yesterday evening, eleven year old (soon to be twelve!) Orion Kim was named the First Place Winner of the 13th annual Minneapolis Music Teachers Forum (MMTF) Mozart Concerto Competition!! As a result, he will have the opportunity to perform a solo concerto movement with orchestra for the very first time. This is such an important "watershed moment" in the life of a budding young pianist and Orion (in typical fashion) will make the very most of it. He will have two formal performances with the Kenwood Symphony of the first movement of Mozart's great Concerto in D minor, K. 466. This is one of just two piano concertos Mozart wrote in a minor key. Beethoven admired this work greatly and wrote cadenzas for the first and last movements. Orion will be performing the Beethoven cadenza written for the first movement. The work is very mature, complex, dramatic, and requires great virtuosity from soloist and orchestra alike.
Orion joins a very exclusive and potent list of our students that have won this competition in the past: Kenny Broberg, Nita Qiu, and Franklin Waldron. Orion SO deserves this award and opportunity. The son of world class musicians, he possesses enormous gifts. He is a charismatic and captivating musical personality on and off stage. His performances exude a passionate devotion to the music combined with an athleticism fused with poetry. He is endowed with a tremendous musical intellect and his performances are a young model of a heartbreaking sincerity and sweetness. I believe he is on his way to becoming an electric performer. And yet, with everything I have just said, the greatest and most important explanation of his astonishing growth over the past two years is his burgeoning work ethic. When most of his peers are still fast asleep, Orion is at the piano at 6:00 am every morning before school. He believes that it is his best practice time - when his mind is the freshest. But this is not an easy thing to do. It requires such discipline, very hard work, and devotion to one's art. Orion is working on something greater than himself, and he knows it - even if it is mainly intuitive.
Please join us in May to celebrate this watershed achievement of Orion's. His collaborator will be the wonderful conductor, Yuri Ivan. Orion could not have a more sympathetic partner. Following is the concert information:
Saturday, May 19th, 7:30 pm
Church of the Annunciation
509 W. 54th Street,
Minneapolis
Sunday, May 20th, 3:00 pm
Ives Auditorium
11411 Masonic Home Drive
Bloomington
