Guest Recital | Balsam Guest Artist Series
Repertoire
Chopin: Scherzo No. 3 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 39 (1839)
Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit (1908)
Naoumoff: Cinq valses for piano four hands (1995)
Beethoven: Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111 (1821-22)
About the Artists
One of the most sought-after pianists of her generation, South Korean pianist HieYon Choi first gained international recognition after winning prizes at such high-profile competitions as Kapell, Epinal, Busoni and Viotti International. Since then, she has performed with renowned orchestras across Europe, the United States, and Korea. She has also been invited as a soloist at numerous festivals and concert series worldwide. Milestones of Choi’s performing career include complete cycles of Beethoven’s respective piano, violin, and cello sonatas, as well as his piano trios. She has collaborated with esteemed musicians including Truls Mørk, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, Peter Stumpf, and Jennifer Koh, among others. A devoted advocate of the new music, she was the inaugural artist-in-residence of Tong-Yeong International Music festival (Korea) and has performed works of a host of modern composers, including Olivier Messiaen, György Kurtag, and Sofia Gubaidulina, among others, for the LA Philharmonic Green Umbrella, Seoul Philharmonic Ars Nova, and Ilshin Prism series, as well as the Seoul International Music Festival. She has also directed contemporary music projects at Seoul National University (SNU). Choi’s recordings include Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas (Decca Korea) as well as releases dedicated to works by Debussy, Liszt, Isang Yun, and Chopin. She has been featured in television and radio broadcasts in Korea, the United States, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany. In 2023, Choi joined the piano faculty at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University after serving for 24 years as a tenured professor at SNU. Many of her students have gone on to establish successful careers as performers and educators in Korea, Germany, France, and the United States. Choi has given numerous master classes worldwide at an array of prestigious institutions in the United States and across Europe. Winner of all four of Korea’s most prestigious competitions, she went on to study at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Her teachers include Joong-Won Koh, Klaus Hellwig, Hans Leygraf, and György Sebők.
Émile Naoumoff has been likened to both Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein, displaying, as one critic remarked, the fire of the former and the poetry of the latter. Also a composer, he was signed at age 18 with the music publisher Schott. Naoumoff revealed himself as a musical prodigy at age five, taking up the piano and adding composition to his studies a year later. At age seven, he became the last disciple of composer Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied until her death. At the same time, he pursued studies at the Paris Conservatory with Lélia Gousseau, Pierre Sancan, and Genevieve Joy-Dutilleux, as well as at the École Normale de Musique de Paris with Pierre Dervaux. Upon Boulanger’s passing, Naoumoff took over her classes at the summer sessions of the Conservatoire d’Art Americain in Fontainebleau. He was later appointed at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, Paris, and in 1996, he opened his own summer academy at the Château de Rangiport in Gargenville, France, in the spirit of Nadia Boulanger. Naoumoff is regularly invited to perform with such orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Symphony, Vienna Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony (Washington, D.C.), and Moscow Symphony. He has worked closely with conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Igor Markevitch, Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Eliahu Inbal. He has also collaborated with such notable musicians as Jean-Pierre Rampal, Gerard Souzay, Yo-Yo Ma, and the Fine Arts Quartet, among many others. Naoumoff is an avid composer of French mélodies, and is known for his mastery in transcribing music for the piano. He maintains a video journal of daily improvisations on his YouTube channel, and he has recorded for EMI, Sony, Phillips, Naxos, Wergo, and Orfeo. Naoumoff is associate professor of music (piano) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
