Doomin Kim

Doomin Kim, who makes his recording debut with this album of piano music by Mendelssohn, is a 16-year-old from South Korea, currently studying at Paris’s École Normale de Musique, an institution founded 100 years ago by no less a pianist than Alfred Cortot.

He first met his piano teacher, Michael Wladkowski, four years ago in Korea. Some eight months later, he visited Paris with his mother for a week of lessons. “His talent was immediately evident and I could see that he loved making music,” says Wladkowski,” who started off by turning the young pianist’s focus to music like Bach Inventions and Haydn sonatas rather than the larger-scale Romantic pieces he had determinedly been learning to play. “He made progress from one minute to the next.”

In 2016, Doomin Kim moved to Paris to study with Wladkowski at the École Normale de Musique. “It was a very big decision for my family. My mother is living with me in Paris while my father has remained in South Korea. I really wanted to be taught by Mr Wladkowski, and though life in Paris is not always easy, I love the inspiration of all its art and culture.”

He is on a pioneering special programme at the École Normale that is built around just a few, exceptionally talented students. “He gets a lot of one-on-one attention,” explains Michael Wladkowski, “and he is making huge progress. He works with enormous dedication, devoting himself to the beauty of whatever he has to do, and he has a huge capacity for learning. There is great depth to his musical understanding, and he’s also expanded his broader culture by reading books like Goethe’s Faust and Dante’s Divine Comedy.”

Doomin Kim started playing the piano at the age of seven. “Within six months I was able to play Czerny études and I had the strong feeling that the piano talked to me. At the age of eight I was deeply impressed by the pianist Kun Woo Paik [an internationally celebrated musician from South Korea], and at that moment, I decided that I wanted to make music my career. Someday soon I want to be a great musician who can touch people’s hearts.”

Michael Wladkowski guided him closely in the choice of repertoire for this Mendelssohn album. “There are a lot of things to say,” says Doomin Kim, “but it is Mr Wladkowski who taught me what real art is.” The best-known works on the programme are the mercurial Rondo capriccioso in E major and the Fantasia in F sharp minor, known as the ‘Scottish Sonata’. Most of the other items are only rarely played. “We put together repertoire that was suitable for Doomin as a young pianist and which wouldn’t invite immediate comparison with Cortot or Horowitz,” explains Wladkowksi. “Like Schumann, Chopin and Liszt, Mendelssohn is one of the earlier Romantics, but he is more Classical in spirit.”

Doomin Kim feels that “the music of Mendelssohn has less philosophical meaning than, say, Beethoven or Chopin, but it compensates with lots of beautiful colours, warmth, charm and even pure sorrow. As I prepared the album, I always got the feeling that, as you follow the melodies, Mendelssohn’s music is like reading a book – a romantic story, a fairy tale or a poem. I hope that people will find peace in their hearts when they listen to it.”