Presented by Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra

Saturday, November 18, 2023, 7:30pm
Garde Arts Center, New London
(325 State St, New London, CT 06320)

Ticket: $15 - $71

The guest artist at the ECSO’s November 18 concert will be Hyung Joon Won, a South Korean-born, Juilliard School-trained violinist, who will perform Antonín Dvořák’s impassioned Violin Concerto in A Minor, composed in 1879.

In 2009, Won, who hopes to form an inter-Korean orchestra with North Korean members, founded the Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra, an annual music festival in South Korea promoting the message of peace and harmony through music. In 2018, ECSO Music Director & Conductor Toshiyuki Shimada joined Won in the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea for a Peace Concert, which featured members of the Yale Symphony and young musicians from South Korea, China, Japan, and Tunisia.

Prior to the Dvořák, the concert will open with the overture to L’Amant Anonyme (The Anonymous Lover), a 1780 comic opera by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Fencer, dancer, violinist, and conductor, Saint Georges, a contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is considered the first acclaimed classical composer of African descent.

After intermission, the ECSO will play Béla Bartók’s five-movement Concerto for Orchestra, which had its premiere in 1944 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. The piece makes use throughout of folk melodies from Bartók’s native Hungary—which he left for New York in 1940—also quoting a song from Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow in the humorous fourth movement, the “interrupted intermezzo.”

For more information, please visit https://ectsymphony.com/11-18-23-dvorak-bartok/

◆ Violinist Hyung Joon Won

Violinist Hyung Joon Won has received the ‘Fair Saturday Foundation Award’ at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2022 for holding a joint performance between North and South Koreas in Shanghai, China and Stockholm, Sweden in 2019. As a child prodigy, Mr. Won gave his first solo performance with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of ten and he won numerous competitions such as the Kingsville International competition, the Juilliard Concerto competition and New York Philharmonic ‘Young Performer’s Audition under the baton of Kurt Masur. Mr. Won has worked with a number of world-renown orchestras as a soloist, including the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra, the Hong Kong Pan Asia Philharmonic, Massapequa Philharmonic, KBS Symphony and the Marrowstone Festival Orchestra. In 1990, Mr. Won proudly represented South Korea when he performed at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland. The forum, which celebrated the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany, inspired Mr. Won to think of music as a medium of reconciliation. In 2017, he performed and gave a speech at UN Geneva as a Peace Talks speaker after a former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. Such performances strengthened his resolve to leverage his musical career for the reunification of North and South Korea. In particular, Mr.Won's 'Panmunjom Peace Concert in 70th Anniversary of Liberation' in 2015 was produced as the 9AT38 documentary film and introduced at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. Since 2017, Mr.Won has collaborated with Maestro Toshiyuki Shimada & the members from Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra & Yale Symphony Orchestra by organizing the DMZ Peace Concert(2018) & the Jeju Island Peace Workshop(2019)and had a joint concert both at the Harvard Paine Concert Hall & Woolsey Hall in 2017. Currently, he is conducting research on virus healing through the 'COVID-19 Vaccine Music' project with MIT Professor Markus Buehler. Presently, Won is serving as Musical Director of Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra, Chief Representative of Soundwith, an Honorary Member of Kirkland House, Harvard University, and an International chair of the Cinema for Peace Foundation of Germany.

Hyung Joon Won: DVORAK & BARTOK