Contemporary Authors

• Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung Crown (New York, NY), 2017

1. Gone : a girl, a violin, a life unstrung LCCN 2016054104 Type of material Book Personal name Kym, Min, author. Main title Gone : a girl, a violin, a life unstrung / Min Kym. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Crown, [2017] Description 227 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780451496072 hardcover 9780451496089 paperback CALL NUMBER ML418.K96 A3 2017 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113) CALL NUMBER ML418.K96 A3 2017 Copy 2 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113)

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2017/05/07/526924474/her-violin-stolen-a-prodigys-world-became-unstrung

  Her Violin Stolen, A Prodigy's World Became 'Unstrung'
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  May 7, 20176:31 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered

  Liz Baker
  Lakshmi Singh

  Lakshmi Singh

  Min Kym is shown at her debut recital at the Serenates D'Estiu Festival in Majorca in July 1992.
  Courtesy of Min Kym/Crown

  For professional musicians, the instrument on which they play is more than just a tool of the trade. It can also be a muse, a partner and a voice.

  Min Kym started playing the violin at age 6 and won her first competition at 11. Now, the former child prodigy is the author of a new book: Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung, in which she shares her story of finding her perfect partner — only to have it stolen away.
  Gone
  Gone

  A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung

  by Min Kym

  Hardcover, 227 pages
  purchase

  "From a very young age, I was aware that the most important thing as a violinist and as a musician is to find your voice through the right instrument," Kym says. For a professional soloist, that means a top-shelf violin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And for Kym, that meant a Stradivarius. She had saved all of her competition winnings for this purpose; it was just a matter of finding the right one.

  When she was 21, an instrument dealer brought her two violins to choose from. "And everybody was sort of pointing towards one of the violins, which had a incredibly sonorous and powerful sound — everything that, as a soloist, you would be looking for," Kym says.

  So she tried that first violin. It sounded "magnificent," but something wasn't right.

  "It was like I was wearing an incredibly beautiful gown that didn't suit me," she says. "And so I put it down and I picked up the other one. And it was smaller, it had been repaired — it had gone through the water. I could see that. However, when I played that first note, just, oh my goodness ... I knew this was my voice."

  She'd found her voice in the form of a rare 1696 Stradivarius, which she describes with wonder as having "an incredible soprano" and an audible "orbit around the notes."

  "The first real, true partnership I felt was with this Strad," Kym says. "I had my violin for 10 years, and I was still getting to know it. Even after 10 years it was still showing me new things, it was teaching me new ways of playing."

  Unfortunately, that partnership wasn't meant to last. What happened next made headlines: One November evening, Kym and her boyfriend were sitting in a café in a London train station when three thieves snagged her violin out from under the table. She's been reliving that moment ever since.
  The Tale Of Another Stolen Strad
  A Stolen, Then Recovered, Stradivarius Returns To The Stage
  Around the Nation
  A Stolen, Then Recovered, Stradivarius Returns To The Stage
  A Rarity Reclaimed: Stolen Stradivarius Recovered After 35 Years
  A Rarity Reclaimed: Stolen Stradivarius Recovered After 35 Years

  "It's one of those things that I still find so horribly painful to talk about," she says. "I didn't know who I was anymore, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I felt as though I was just a sort of shell of a person. ... You know, when it's a human relationship, it's something that everybody can relate to and understand. But I think as a violinist, as a musician, as an artist, when you know the relationship that you have with your particular art, it's something that lives inside you and has a life of its own. And that's very difficult to explain or describe."

  Three years later, detectives were actually able to recover Kym's violin. But her insurance company had paid out the claim after it was stolen, and she had a career to carry on with — so Kym had already used the money to buy a replacement violin. But she couldn't stop thinking about the one she had lost. It was writing her memoir, she says, that helped her move forward.

  "One of the most important things that I learned throughout this whole process is that we have such little control over anything," she says. "But one thing that we do control is how you deal with the next steps forward. Writing — actually finding this new voice — it helped unblock my musical life. And, you know, for the first time in seven years or so, I felt hopeful again."

• author's site - http://www.minkym.com/

  MIN KYM, born in South Korea and raised in the UK, began playing the violin at the age of six. At sixteen, she became the youngest ever foundation scholar at the Royal College of Music; at twenty-seven, the first recipient of the Heifetz Prize. The legendary conductor Sir Georg Solti praised her “exceptional natural talent, mature musicality, and mastery of the violin.” Her Sony recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto with Sir Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra was released in 2010. She lives in London.

• Warner Classics - http://www.warnerclassics.com/min-kym/bio

  March 14, 2017
  Biography

  South Korean born and raised in the UK, Min Kym began playing the violin at the age of six. At seven she was accepted as the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music; at 16 she was the youngest ever foundation scholar at the Royal College of Music. The legendary conductor George Solti said she had 'exceptional natural talent, mature musicality and mastery of the violin'. In 2010 she recorded the Brahms Violin Concerto with Sir Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra. She was the first ever recipient of the Heifetz Prize, and is a goodwill ambassador for the city of Seoul.

  In April 2017 Penguin Random House publishes her memoir, Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung, exploring the trauma and grief Kym experienced when her violin – a priceless 1696 Stradivarius – was stolen from her. The Warner Classics companion album to the book includes her student recordings as well as professional recordings made at Abbey Road with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davis with the instrument that was later stolen.

• NY TImes - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/gone-min-kym-interview.html

  Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: A Prodigy Loses Her ‘Soul Mate’ — a Rare Violin

  By JOHN WILLIAMSAPRIL 24, 2017
  Continue reading the main story
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  “I knew right away that holding a violin, playing a violin, was not simply for me, but it was me.” That’s how Min Kym describes one of her first music lessons as a child, in “Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung.” Kym’s memoir details the shock waves that followed after her rare 1696 Stradivarius was stolen from a London cafe. The theft sent Kym reeling, an experience she describes in the book, as she also delves into what it meant to be a prodigy raised by a traditional Korean family living in London. Below, she tells us about how the book changed as she wrote it, the most surprising thing she learned while finishing it, and more.

  When did you first get the idea to write this book?

  A few years after my violin was stolen, I began to be flooded by memories and realizations, so I began to write. I realized there were so many things I hadn’t fully understood about my life, above all the strangeness of growing up as a child prodigy and how that had shaped me. For the first time I recognized how much I had been pushed, not only by my teachers and mentors but my own expectations. I was a perfectionist, and music and the violin became the sole focus of my life. Perhaps this was in part a response to, or a way of dealing with, the constant uncertainty I felt treading the delicate balance between my Korean family and my British upbringing, between the joy I took in playing and the intensity of my musical education.

  Somehow this ideal version of who I should be took such root that I ended up with the sense that I was not allowed to be human; that to have weaknesses and, worse, to show them was to fail. It was only after the theft of my beloved violin, my soul mate, that I realized how little I had to show for my life away from practice and the stage. I had built a life on sand — without my violin I didn’t know who I was anymore. The theft of my violin was also a theft of my identity. I wrote this book to rediscover who I was.

  What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

  I learned that the funny thing about sharing secrets, especially the kind I’d been holding on to for so long — sadness over my lost childhood, the grief of losing the thing to which I had given my whole life — is that once I let go of the shame I felt in having these perceived weaknesses, I experienced an overwhelming sense of relief. It was both liberating and deeply nourishing to revisit and reconnect with those lost years.
  Continue reading the main story

  It was also a surprise to discover that I had a personal voice, not just a voice though the violin. Though I was telling my story through words instead of sound, I found that the two languages had things in common. Often I’d just let a stream of words flow without filters, then smooth and shape what I’d written afterwards, paying attention to rhythm, tempo, motifs. In some ways, writing the book felt like doing a translation — words into music, music into words.

  In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

  In the beginning I thought it would be mainly about the theft of my Stradivarius — almost a eulogy for my violin. And I do go into this quite a bit: how it came to feel like an extension of my body; how it truly felt like a partner; how the loss of it stunned me into silence. I think that pretty much all string players understand that feeling of attachment to their instrument. As my teacher Ruggiero Ricci once said to me, “I’ve had three wives, but only one violin.”

  But as I went deeper into how events unfolded, I saw how all my life I had allowed myself to be maneuvered and controlled. I was a grown woman and I still hadn’t learned that it was my right to say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” So it became a book about reclaiming myself. Writing it gave me strength to examine the feeling of obedience that lived inside me and to challenge it, to trust my instincts.

  Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

  Not long after the theft, I was wandering around London and found myself in the National Gallery, standing in front of “Long Grass With Butterflies,” by van Gogh. He’d painted this picture while confined to the grounds of a sanatorium in the final months before his death — no perspective, no sky, just the grass and these tiny butterflies. Despite all the despair and suffering he had gone through, he was able to pour his entire soul into one painting with no barrier. It felt so guileless. I thought if he could do this, then perhaps I could write my book.

  Persuade someone to read it in less than 50 words.

  What is it like being a child prodigy? Music is the element in which you swim, dive, soar. Yet you also feel the weight of expectation, relinquish ownership of your life. What if you then lose the instrument that has always defined you and must reckon with your own single-mindedness?

  This interview, conducted by email, has been condensed and edited.

• Penguins - https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/min-kym/127026/

  South Korean born and raised in the UK, Min Kym began playing the violin at the age of six. At seven she was accepted as the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music; at 16 she was the youngest ever foundation scholar at the Royal College of Music. The legendary conductor George Solti said she had 'exceptional natural talent, mature musicality and mastery of the violin'. In 2010 she recorded the Brahms Violin Concerto with Sir Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra. She was the first ever recipient of the Heifetz Prize, and is a goodwill ambassador for the city of Seoul.

• Gone the ALbum - https://www.gonethealbum.com/

  Gone: The Album

  Penguin Random House and Warner Classics have partnered to release a companion album to violinist Min Kym’s memoir, Gone.

  At seven years old, she was a prodigy, the youngest ever student at the famed Purcell School. At eleven, she won her first international prize; at eighteen, violinist great Ruggiero Ricci called her “the most talented violinist I’ve ever taught.” And at twenty-one, she found “the one,” the violin she would play as a soloist: a rare 1696 Stradivarius. Her career took off. She recorded the Brahms concerto and a world tour was planned.

  Then, in a London café, her violin was stolen. She felt as though she had lost her soul mate. Overnight, she became unable to play or function, stunned into silence. In her lucid and transfixing memoir, Min reckons with the space left by her violin’s absence. And in the stark yet clarifying light of her loss, she rediscovers her voice and herself.

  “I am so excited that Warner are going to release this album with Penguin. These tracks represent a highly personal snapshot of my musical development from the age of 11 – some of them were recorded on cassette tape during lessons (and had I known that one day they would be released, I’d have no doubt practiced harder!). But this was the reality: my reality as a child prodigy, and a life as a musician. I’m proud of the pieces I played with my stolen Stradivarius though they sound like a lifetime ago. In a sense, this album is as much a memoir told in music as the book is in words.”

• Peters Fraser & Dunlop - https://www.petersfraserdunlop.com/clients/min-kym/

  Min Kym

  South Korean-born and raised in the UK, Min Kym began playing the violin at the age of six. A year later, she was accepted as a scholar at the Purcell School of Music on a full scholarship with the distinction of being the school’s youngest-ever pupil. Ms Kym was also the youngest participant at the Schleswig Holstein Summer Music Festival, aged nine. At the age of eleven, she appeared on worldwide television, winning first prize at the Premier Mozart International Competition in Bologna, Italy. Making her international debut at the age of thirteen in 1991 with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Min Kym was immediately invited to perform with the Seville Symphony Orchestra in Spain and later that same year made her Korean debut at the invitation of Kyung Wha Chung. At the age of sixteen she became the youngest student ever to be awarded a Foundation Scholarship at the Royal College of Music and went on to study with Ruggiero Ricci in Salzburg who commented that she was “…the most talented violinist I have ever worked with”. In 1998 she was awarded ‘Most Promising Artist of the 21st Century’ Award in Korea. In 2005, Min Kym became the first ever recipient of the prestigious Heifetz Prize as awarded by the Jascha Heifetz Society in Los Angeles.

  Min Kym has performed with many of the world’s leading orchestras including The Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle and has worked with eminent conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Andrew Davis and Giuseppe Sinopoli. Min Kym is a goodwill ambassador for the city of Seoul.

  Gone is the story of the intense bond an artist forms with their one “true” instrument – in Kym’s case, a 1696 Stradivarius which she began playing at the age of 21. After securing a Sony recording contract and commanding solo recitals at the world’s most prestigious concert halls, in 2010, the violin was stolen from her. Traumatised and unable to play, her career fell apart. In 2013, the violin was recovered, but the story was far from over. Gone will be published by Viking Penguin in the UK in 2017.

• Bookseller - https://www.thebookseller.com/profile/min-kym-instrument-just-seemed-complete-my-life-547401

  Min Kym | 'The instrument just seemed to complete my life'
  Published May 4, 2017 by Caroline Sanderson

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  Min Kym and I are looking closely at a black and white photograph, taken when she was seven years old. A tiny child in white socks, she is playing the quarter-size violin tucked under her chin with the demeanour of a virtuoso. “I’m playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto,” says Kym, after studying the position of her hands.

  Born in South Korea, Min Kym, now an elegant and engaging woman in her late thirties, was a child prodigy. As she records in the first half of her intense and elegiac memoir, Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung (April, Viking), she began playing the violin at the age of six; her family had recently relocated to the UK for her father to take up a mechanical engineer post. Kym’s mother, a child of the Korean War and a classical music lover, initially hoped violin lessons would keep her younger daughter quiet. “I was kicking my heels, watching my sister play the piano and I think I was being a bit of a pain, so my Mum said: ‘Why don’t you learn something as well?’”

  Her first lesson was life-changing. “People talk about that first rush. I’ll never forget the first time I picked up a violin. I didn’t realise it then, but what I was feeling was love.” For a Korean child, trying to adjust to an alien culture, thousands of miles from the bulk of her family, the violin provided a kind of anchor. “The instrument just seemed to complete my life,” she recalls.

  The rapidity of Kym’s progress was extraordinary. She passed Grade 2 after eight weeks of playing, and a month later, Grade 4 with the highest mark in the country. At seven, she became the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. Her family began to make sacrifices in order to support her fledgling career. “Already it was being made very clear to me, what they thought I was, what they thought I’d become.” With the obedience and conformity traditionally expected of a Korean child, Kym followed the path that was being laid out for her. Occasionally, as Kym’s violin increasingly did her talking for her, a warning note would sound: “I would hear the words ‘child prodigy’ said of me all the time, and sometimes I used to ponder: What does that mean? I was aware that it was causing a sort of distance.”

  At the age of 11 she won her first major international competition, and despite yearning for “a normality that was denied me”, her teens brought increasing amounts of foreign travel as she gave recitals around the world. “Min the violinist getting ahead... Min the person going nowhere,” she writes of this time, when a starry career as a solo performer and recording artist beckoned.

  Then, at the age of 21, Kym fell in love. Having played a succession of increasingly fine violins throughout her early career, she was offered the chance to buy a 1696 Stradivarius. Gone contains a wealth of fascinating detail about violin anatomy and what makes Stradivarius violins so special - and so often the chosen instruments of virtuoso soloists. “The sound has a purity and an open, bell-like quality. When you play a Stradivarius, there’s this glow, this whoosh around the note which is unmistakable,” Kym tells me.

  Devastating insight

  Each Stradivarius violin also has its own distinct personality. And the 1696 Strad that Kym played that day felt destined for her from the beginning. “The instant I drew the first breath with my bow, I knew,” she writes. “Now I held the violin that would be the key to my art, that would will me to produce all that I could produce...this was marriage till death do us part.” It was like meeting her soulmate. “It was quite small, with narrow shoulders. For me that was perfect, because I don’t have terribly big hands. Physically my violin and I were just so compatible; an incredible fit. And this hypnotic, silken sound came from the top register and I just fell in love with it straight away.”

  The violin cost £450,000. In order to buy it, Kym remortgaged her flat and took out a huge loan. It was another three years before she found the perfect bow to go with it. For the next 10 years, she and her violin played big concert venues around the world. Aware of the instrument’s inherent sensitivity and fragility, Kym hated to let it out of her sight, even briefly, and not only because of its value. “All loved violins sound beautiful to their owners, just like every baby is beautiful to every mother,” she writes.

  And then in November 2010, with Sony about to release Kym’s recording of Brahms’ Violin Concerto, calamity struck. Drinking tea in a café at Euston station, Kym allowed her boyfriend at the time - the unhealthy control he had over her is evident in the book - to persuade her to unhook her violin from its customary position, with its strap wound securely around her legs, and move it to the side with the rest of their luggage. “I was fed up... I was in a bad mood and he wore me down,” Kym remembers.

  Unbeknown to them, professional thieves were circling. Moments later, the violin had gone. The title of Kym’s memoir refers both to this dreadful moment and to its far-reaching consequences, not only for her career but for her state of mind and sense of identity. “There were fathoms beneath me, cold and dark,” she writes. Following the loss of her violin, Kym entered a period of deep mourning, shutting herself in her room, wearing black clothes and expunging music from her life. When the theft hit the headlines, the press reports compounded her agony by making light of it: “A violin worth more than £1m was stolen from a brilliant musician when she stopped for a £2.95 sandwich,” as the Daily Mail put it. As Kym relives the moment of the theft seven years later, her eyes brim with tears. To this day, she is haunted by dreams of her lost violin.

  Devastating insight

  The second half of Gone reveals both the fate of her Stradivarius and how its owner recovered from the trauma of losing her soulmate. The process was an immensely painful one, but with the hiatus in her career, Kym was able - for the first time ever - to properly reflect on her life to date: her strange, even dysfunctional childhood (“What is a child prodigy? A means to another’s end”), her long-concealed eating disorder, and the nature of her former boyfriend’s control over her. “The violin was a crutch. It was the thing that supported me, and once it was gone, I realised that I’d almost built my life on sand,” she says, with devastating insight.

  In time, Kym started to enjoy music. Eventually she played again; at first “just for the love of playing”. She also found a new partner, an Amati: a “Sleeping Beauty” of a violin which had lain unplayed for 100 years. She is preparing to relaunch her solo career, and to coincide with the publication of Gone, a soundtrack will be released by Warner Classics on Spotify and Apple Music, featuring recordings from an tape made when Kym was only 11, to the Brahms Concerto recorded for Sony.

  Writing Gone has been a healing experience, Kym tells me. “It took me such a long time, but eventually I discovered a voice that the violin had completely taken over. This supressed, repressed person came out. But the stronger that person became, the more I realised I needed to talk about this. And now I’m talking to everyone.”

• Straits Times - http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/discovering-her-voice-outside-music

  Violinist Min-Jin Kym discovers her voice outside music
  Violinist Min-Jin Kym's Stradivarius violin was stolen in 2010 and found three years later, but there was no happy ending.
  Violinist Min-Jin Kym's Stradivarius violin was stolen in 2010 and found three years later, but there was no happy ending.PHOTO: ORLI ROSE
  Published
  May 30, 2017, 5:00 am SGT
  Min-Jin Kym wants to put the record straight on her life after her $2.1m Stradivarius violin was stolen and her career suffered
  Olivia Ho

  Violinist Min-Jin Kym made international headlines seven years ago when her rare Stradivarius violin was stolen at a London train station, and again three years later when it was miraculously recovered by the police.

  But this happy ending - the ecstatic musician reunited with her £1.2-million (S$2.1-million) instrument - would turn out hollow.

  Opening up years later, the 38-year-old reveals that due to insurance complications, her beloved violin never truly returned to her.

  Her new memoir, Gone, is an insight into the life of a child prodigy and an attempt to convey to the layman the incredible bond a musician forms with his or her instrument, and how the theft of her Stradivarius unstrung her life.

  "It's not something I'd expect somebody who's not a musician to understand," says Kym over the telephone from London, where she lives. "Why should they?"

  Kym, a South Korea-born prodigy who grew up in Britain, became, at the age of seven, the youngest pupil to join the illustrious Purcell School of music. She won her first international music competition at the age of 11.

  Violinist Min-Jin Kym's Stradivarius violin was stolen in 2010 and found three years later, but there was no happy ending.

  She met her violin when she was 21 and it was a little more than 300 years old. It had been crafted in 1696 by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari, considered the greatest violin-maker to have lived.

  Drawing her bow across its strings for the first time, she writes, was her Cinderella moment, the glass slipper sliding perfectly onto her foot.

  "All my life had been a rehearsal... everything leading up to now, when I would meet my violin and we would begin."

  They were together for 10 years, until a fateful night in 2010, when she and her then boyfriend, a cellist, stopped on their way home to grab a bite at a train station cafe.

  Kym recounts how she normally sits with the strap of her violin case around her ankle, but her boyfriend persuaded her to pass it to him because she looked uncomfortable.

  Thus, they did not notice when it was lifted by three thieves who, at that point, had no idea of its value or the distress its loss would cause.

  It would be three years before the violin was recovered, during which the police would chase several false leads, including one in Bulgaria, and the real thieves were arrested. One was jailed for four years, while his teenage accomplices were sent to youth detention centres.

  During this period, Kym sank into depression, made worse by criticism in the press that she had been careless to take public transport with a million-pound violin.

  She stopped playing and her career suffered, with a prestigious record deal fizzling out.

  When her violin was recovered, she could no longer afford to buy it back from the insurance company. It was sold at auction and now belongs to another musician, who plays in a consortium.

  Kym, who did not speak directly to the press during this period, decided last year that she wanted to reclaim her story.

  "I wanted to put the record straight, to draw a line in the sand and take ownership of my life."

  Much of her life, she says, has been marked by passiveness. In her family, she and her sister bowed to their elders and never began meals until after their father, a mechanical engineer, had finished.

  This subservience persisted as she passed from teacher to teacher - her first regarded her as a trophy, "a little diamond" to be "polished".

  When she was 11, she developed anorexia after an older girl saw her eating pasta and remarked: "Nobody wants to see a fat performer."

  The school, she says, was aware of her eating disorder, but a tutor warned her to hide it. "It will kill your career," she was told.

  Writing the book helped her realise the subtle ways in which she, as a female and child performer, had been conditioned to relinquish control over her life. "Writing gave me the strength to recognise that it's an incredibly important thing to listen to your gut instinct," says Kym, who is single. "Without that, what are you?"

  She is slowly returning to the world of music. She has a new violin, an Amati which she is learning to love, and is doing a series of festivals for music and literature around Britain over the next few months.

  Putting her experience down in words has been cathartic, she says.

  "The most unexpected thing about writing the book was discovering that I had a voice outside of music and the violin.

  "What I've learnt is that we have such little control over our lives. But what you do have some control over is how you deal with things and how you move forward."

  •Gone ($30.98) is available at major bookstores.

Kym, Min: GONE
(Mar. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Kym, Min GONE Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 4, 25 ISBN: 978-0-451-49607-2

A child prodigy suffers a great loss and then finds herself.This memoir tells a number of different stories, all of them involving what the virtuosic violinist calls "two Mins." The first is that of a South Korea-born girl living in England learning that children should be subservient to elders and that girls are inferior. Then there is the prodigy Min, who came to realize just how isolated she had become from ordinary life. Ultimately, there was Min with the violin and Min without, and she developed into a woman who has a life independent of her instrument, one who has found some measure of peace and fulfillment on her own as well as a mature perspective on what she has been through: "I was a little Korean girl thrown into a strange world. I was asked to perform without quite knowing who I was. It's still a strange world, and I am still Korean, but I don't bow any more. I know who I am." In the early chapters, the writing about a child's passion for music, how it differs for a prodigy, and how it feels to be part of two cultures and somehow apart from each has a purity and stylistic simplicity that are themselves musical, as if Kym has been able to transfer her great potential from her violin to her writing. Yet the story at the heart of this memoir has a complexity with which the author still wrestles. Kym resents that she accedes to the insistence of others, to mentors and to men in general, and her failure to follow her better instincts resulted in the theft of her extremely valuable 1696 Stradivarius violin. She might have eventually gotten it back if, again, she hadn't listened to others in making wrong decisions. The story of losing, regaining, and losing the violin again keeps the author torn between accepting responsibility and resenting others. "I had devils in my ear," she writes. A pellucid memoir of letting go and coming to terms.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kym, Min: GONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b69c89d2. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911824

The lost Stradivarius
Alexandra Coghlan
333.9841 (Apr. 8, 2017): p34+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung

by Min Kym

PenguinViking, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 247

Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won't find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules or YouTube videos. What you'll get are news reports. Because one evening in 2010, when Kym was waiting for a train at Euston Station, her 300-year-old Stradivarius violin was stolen. Almost three years later it was recovered, and an 'elated' Kym was back in the papers, but the happy ending was more editorial convenience than truth. Now Kym herself has written a memoir in an attempt to explain what she really lost that day, and the impossibility of ever truly recovering it.

Gone is an awkward book. The style shouts thriller--a relentless drumbeat of staccato sentences and long-trailed expectation --but the content is the discursive, drifting stuff of memoir. Being a child prodigy is a life that straddles genres, flirting with technical manual, self-help book and YA fiction on its journey to adult autobiography, but it doesn't make for the easiest of reads, especially in first-time hands. Kym's violin, as she repeatedly tells us, is her voice, but there's a sense here of the author trying on another for size, one that --as yet--can't manage much more than a whisper.

'A Life Unstrung': the subtitle contains a potent image, but one that, like so much else in this memoir, doesn't really belong to its author. In shaping the book's central idea, an elision between player and instrument, woman and object, she borrows cultural rhetoric that comes ready-loaded. When we read that 'The violin was part of me and I part of the violin', we think of Man Ray's 'Le Violon d'Ingres'

--the woman with a violin's F holes in her back, the instrument on which the photographer plays his visual music; or of Magritte's 'La Decouverte'--her flesh transforming into wood under the artist's gaze; or even perhaps of the ghastly cover art for R. Kelly's Black Panties album, in which the singer 'plays' a naked woman with a cello bow. We struggle to see clearly through to the timid pencil strokes of Kym's own self-portrait.

Because while this is a book about music, about the life of a child prodigy, a violin found and lost, it's as much a book about being a woman. The two narratives are indivisible. Again and again as Kym tells her story, her prodigious talent becomes a vehicle for men to express themselves: something for teachers, dealers, conductors, fathers and lovers to appropriate and claim as their own. 'She is a little diamond, and I want to be the one to polish her,' says her professor--the first of many to see himself reflected back in her brilliance.

And this is where things really do come into focus. Kym's prose struggles under the weight of introspection, but supports her surrounding characters with neat efficiency. The puppyish young lover whose affection becomes stifling control; the expert-by-endeavour who cannot connect with the instinctive prodigy; Kym's Korean family, who must learn to adapt to their unusual daughter--all are swiftly, skilfully drawn. It's the book of a woman who has grown up watching rather than speaking out, translating action into thought rather than the reverse. 'But I wasn't strong enough', is a recurring refrain--a weakness born of training and habit as much as the anorexia the author reveals in the closing pages--and one whose pliant passivity is only partly vanquished here.

There's a real appetite for books about the singularity of genius, and while Gone goes some way towards feeding that, returning three times to the question of what it is to be a prodigy, delivering darker answers with each iteration--'It's a means to another's end. There's a price to pay, and that price is you'--it is surprisingly light on music. We get the compulsion of playing, the ease of it, the urgency of it, but comparatively little about the repertoire that is generated by it. Kym could be a mathematician or a chess champion and the book would read much the same.

Perhaps that's the point; to be a prodigy is to be given a gift, not a choice, and to accept it is to become a curator, not necessarily an artist. Kym's interest in music is that of the golfer's in the courses he plays --functional, unquestioning. Her real passion is reserved for fellow violinists, Heifetz in particular, whose style she describes in language suddenly agile and precise.

And what of the violin itself, the 1696 Stradivarius eventually restored to Kym, only to be torn away again, sold to appease the insurance company and dealers hungry to capitalise on its new notoriety? It remains an elusive symbol--a vessel, whose hollow body becomes the space into which Kym pours herself, conceals herself, reshaping her own embattled body in its image. 'You're the artist, not the violin,' says Kym's friend. But she's not so sure, and by the end of this frustrating, intermittently fascinating book, neither are we.

Caption: 'Damn, that's not roadkill ... that's a toupee.'

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Coghlan, Alexandra. "The lost Stradivarius." Spectator, 8 Apr. 2017, p. 34+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498477584/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2a4f78f. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A498477584

Min Kym: Min Kym's soulmate was a 1696 Stradivarius--which she played in concert halls around the world--until the day it was stolen and her world came apart
Caroline Sanderson
.5743 (Feb. 10, 2017): p22+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Bookseller Media Limited
http://www.thebookseller.com
METADATA

Imprint Viking

Publication 06.04.16

Formats EB/HB/Audio

ISBN 9780241977392, 263150/1977408

rights sold to Crown in the US editor Joel Rickett

agent Annabel merullo, PFD

Min Kym and I are looking closely at a black and white photograph left, taken when she was seven years old. A tiny child in white socks, she is playing the quarter-size violin tucked under her chin with the demeanour of a virtuoso. "I'm playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto," says Kym, after studying the position of her hands.

Born in South Korea, Min Kym, now an elegant and engaging woman in her late thirties, was a child prodigy. As she records in the first half of her intense and elegiac memoir, Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung, she began playing the violin at the age of six; her family had recently relocated to the UK for her father to take up a mechanical engineer post. Kym's mother, a child of the Korean War and a classical music lover, initially hoped violin lessons would keep her younger daughter quiet. "I was kicking my heels, watching my sister play the piano and I think I was being a bit of a pain, so my Mum said: 'Why don't you learn something as well?'"

Her first lesson was life-changing. "People talk about that first rush. I'll never forget the first time I picked up a violin. I didn't realise it then, but what I was feeling was love." For a Korean child, trying to adjust to an alien culture, thousands of miles from the bulk of her family, the violin provided a kind of anchor. "The instrument just seemed to complete my life," she recalls.

The rapidity of Kym's progress was extraordinary. She passed Grade 2 after eight weeks of playing, and a month later, Grade 4 with the highest mark in the country. At seven, she became the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. Her family began to make sacrifices in order to support her fledgling career. "Already it was being made very clear to me, what they thought I was, what they thought I'd become." With the obedience and conformity traditionally expected of a Korean child, Kym followed the path that was being laid out for her. Occasionally, as Kym's violin increasingly did her talking for her, a warning note would sound: "I would hear the words 'child prodigy' said of me all the time, and sometimes I used to ponder: What does that mean? I was aware that it was causing a sort of distance."

At the age of 11 she won her first major international competition, and despite yearning for "a normality that was denied me", her teens brought increasing amounts of foreign travel as she gave recitals around the world. "Min the violinist getting ahead . . . Min the person going nowhere," she writes of this time, when a starry career as a solo performer and recording artist beckoned.

Then, at the age of 21, Kym fell in love. Having played a succession of increasingly fine violins throughout her early career, she was offered the chance to buy a 1696 Stradivarius. Gone contains a wealth of fascinating detail about violin anatomy and what makes Stradivarius violins so special--and so often the chosen instruments of virtuoso soloists. "The sound has a purity and an open, bell-like quality. When you play a Stradivarius, there's this glow, this whoosh around the note which is unmistakable," Kym tells me.

DEVASTATING INSIGHT

Each Stradivarius violin also has its own distinct personality. And the 1696 Strad that Kym played that day felt destined for her from the beginning. "The instant I drew the first breath with my bow, I knew," she writes. "Now I held the violin that would be the key to my art, that would will me to produce all that I could produce ... this was marriage till death do us part." It was like meeting her soulmate. "It was quite small, with narrow shoulders. For me that was perfect, because I don't have terribly big hands. Physically my violin and I were just so compatible; an incredible fit. And this hypnotic, silken sound came from the top register and I just fell in love with it straight away."

The violin cost 450,000 [pounds sterling]. In order to buy it, Kym remortgaged her flat and took out a huge loan. It was another three years before she found the perfect bow to go with it. For the next 10 years, she and her violin played big concert venues around the world. Aware of the instrument's inherent sensitivity and fragility, Kym hated to let it out of her sight, even briefly, and not only because of its value. "All loved violins sound beautiful to their owners, just like every baby is beautiful to every mother," she writes.

And then in November 2010, with Sony about to release Kym's recording of Brahms' Violin Concerto, calamity struck. Drinking tea in a cafe at Euston station, Kym allowed her boyfriend at the time--the unhealthy control he had over her is evident in the book--to persuade her to unhook her violin from its customary position, with its strap wound securely around her legs, and move it to the side with the rest of their luggage. "I was fed up ... I was in a bad mood and he wore me down," Kym remembers.

Unbeknown to them, professional thieves were circling. Moments later, the violin had gone. The title of Kym's memoir refers both to this dreadful moment and to its far-reaching consequences, not only for her career but for her state of mind and sense of identity. "There were fathoms beneath me, cold and dark," she writes. Following the loss of her violin, Kym entered a period of deep mourning, shutting herself in her room, wearing black clothes and expunging music from her life. When the theft hit the headlines, the press reports compounded her agony by making light of it: "A violin worth more than 1m [pounds sterling] was stolen from a brilliant musician when she stopped for a 2.95 [pounds sterling] sandwich," as the Daily Mail put it. As Kym relives the moment of the theft seven years later, her eyes brim with tears. To this day, she is haunted by dreams of her lost violin.

DEVASTATING INSIGHT

The second half of Gone reveals both the fate of her Stradivarius and how its owner recovered from the trauma of losing her soulmate. The process was an immensely painful one, but with the hiatus in her career, Kym was able--for the first time ever--to properly reflect on her life to date: her strange, even dysfunctional childhood ("What is a child prodigy? A means to another's end"), her long-concealed eating disorder, and the nature of her former boyfriend's control over her. "The violin was a crutch. It was the thing that supported me, and once it was gone, I realised that I'd almost built my life on sand," she says, with devastating insight.

In time, Kym started to enjoy music. Eventually she played again; at first "just for the love of playing". She also found a new partner, an Amati: a "Sleeping Beauty" of a violin which had lain unplayed for 100 years. She is preparing to relaunch her solo career, and to coincide with the publication of Gone, a soundtrack will be released by Warner Classics on Spotify and Apple Music, featuring recordings from an tape made when Kym was only 11, to the Brahms Concerto recorded for Sony.

Writing Gone has been a healing experience, Kym tells me. "It took me such a long time, but eventually I discovered a voice that the violin had completely taken over. This supressed, repressed person came out. But the stronger that person became, the more I realised I needed to talk about this. And now I'm talking to everyone."

QUICK CV

1978

Born seoul, south Korea

1990

Wins first prize in the Premier Mozart competition

1991

Debut concert with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra

2004

Wins the International Jascha Heifetz Competition for Violinists

2007

Records Beethoven's Violin Concerto for Sony Classical

2017

Publishes Gone; releases CD with Warner Classics

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sanderson, Caroline. "Min Kym: Min Kym's soulmate was a 1696 Stradivarius--which she played in concert halls around the world--until the day it was stolen and her world came apart." The Bookseller, 10 Feb. 2017, p. 22+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481243880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b36f337. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A481243880

Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung
Charlotte Gardner
95.1149 (June 2017): p100+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Haymarket Media Group
http://www.haymarket.com/gramophone/gramophone_magazine/default.aspx
Gone

A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung

By Min Kym

Viking, PB, 256pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling]

ISBN 978-0-451-49608-9

As opening pages go, Gone's gets full marks for capacity to send a shiver down a musician's spine. The scene is an airport check-in desk and the book's author, Korean violinist Min Kym, has just been told her violin has to travel in the plane's hold. As a result, all she can now do is to watch helplessly as her instrument shudders slowly away down the conveyor belt, while a sixth sense tells her she will never see it again. 'The violin gives a little start, as if it's been pushed in the back', she narrates, 'something it won't have liked, and then starts to be carried away, slowly disappearing through the rubber straps.'

Turn the page and you discover that this has in fact just been a terrible dream; but it's one rooted in reality because in 2010 Kym's 1696 Stradivarius really was taken from her, stolen as she sat with her boyfriend in Euston station's Pret A Manger. Its loss made international headlines, as did its recovery in 2013, and also its sale shortly afterwards, for 1.385m [pounds sterling] through the fine-instrument auction house Tarisio. At the time Kym said very little in public other than to express her pleasure at the violin's safe return, but now we have Gone, tag-lined A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung, and if you're at all of a questioning bent then you're going to find it a rather curious read.

For those (probably most) who need a memory-jog, Min Kym is a former child prodigy who aged seven became the youngest-ever pupil at The Purcell School. At 21 she purchased from Beare's the eventually-to-be-stolen Stradivarius she describes as 'part of me'. Recordings followed: Lalo's Symphonie espagnole in 2001 with the London Symphony Orchestra and Barry Wordsworth (Claudio, A/02), then in 2008 the Beethoven Concerto with Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra (Sony Classical, 4/08). When her violin was stolen in 2010 she had just recorded the Brahms Concerto, again with Davis and the Philharmonia for Sony. After that point, however, her trail goes cold, and Gone explains why: how her background as a compliant child prodigy from a patriarchal Korean culture meant that the loss of her violin soulmate left her first silenced and 'unstrung', and then unable to fight for her violin when it reappeared.

Gone is not aimed primarily at specialist classical music lovers, but at a wider audience. Its title echoes Gillian Flynn's multi-million-selling suspense novel Gone Girl, as does its self-consciously poetic, statement-like prose. There's also a 'listen as you read' tie-in album on Warner Classics featuring some of Kym's past recordings. Then there's the surrounding publicity, such as a modelling campaign with the clothing brand Finery London.

The more classically knowledgeable, and indeed anyone who prefers a more refined literary style, may find Gone rather irritating. But if you stick with it there are interesting nuggets. For instance, Kym's description of life as a child prodigy is thought-provoking: the expectations placed on her, the isolation from her peers, living an adult life managed by adults, and perhaps most interestingly her obsession with other former child prodigies such as Heifetz, plus the bond with her former child-prodigy teacher, Ruggiero Ricci. Gone also broaches the issue of the prohibitive cost to musicians of fine instruments. Should a Stradivarius have a life as the voice of a musician, it asks, or as the silently appreciating investment of a collector?

Of more intriguing interest is Kym's explanation of why the precious Stradivarius was sold when it was recovered. In essence, this was because it no longer belonged to her but to the insurance company that had paid out its value, and she couldn't raise the funds to buy it back within the specified time period because she'd divided their payout between a new instrument for herself and giving financial help to her parents. However, it also seems clear that Kym regrets accepting the advice given by Tarisio, the 'devils in my ear', where Kym's boyfriend worked and works, which encouraged her to buy through them another Strad as a replacement, within her price range because it had been through the wars, rather than an ever-appreciating Guadagnini as advised by Beare's.

Still, she made all her own decisions, and overall her story raises all sorts of questions. How could she be unaware of consortiums of philanthropists who purchase instruments for artists in need? And why did she need one specific violin in order to play?

Then there's the billion-dollar question. Within what professional context does Gone now sit? On the one hand its conclusion sets Kym up as a violinist, ending on her recent joyful purchase of a Nicolo Amati instrument, and the words (in staccato prose typical of her writing): 'Don't blame it on anyone. It happened. I was born in Korea. I bowed to my father, took my shoes off before I ate. I played a tune and won a prize. I found my violin. I listened to the wrong man. I was a little Korean girl thrown into a strange world. I was asked to perform without knowing quite who I was. It's still a strange world, I'm still Korean, but I don't bow any more. I know who I am ... My Strad is gone but I can play again ... My name is Min. I play the violin.' However, if you hunt online you won't find an artist page, manager details or a concert schedule, and my attempts to get clarity from the Penguin press officer assigned to her were met with silence. Perhaps Kym doesn't yet know herself, and is waiting to see what comes of the book.

Those familiar with Gone Girl will know that the final twist is that its narrators turn out to be unreliable. It would be wrong and I suspect inaccurate to accuse Gone and Kym of that, but certainly its conclusion leaves as many questions hanging as a suspense novel.

Caption: The theft of Min Kym's Stradivarius violin from Euston station in 2010 made international headlines

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gardner, Charlotte. "Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung." Gramophone, June 2017, p. 100+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497671158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=be322209. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497671158

At long last, a violinist and her cherished million-pound Stradivarius are reunited
Charlotte Smith
91.1101 (Sept. 15, 2013): p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Haymarket Media Group
http://www.haymarket.com/gramophone/gramophone_magazine/default.aspx
Three years is a long time to wait for the return of stolen property--and even more so when that property happens to be a rare Antonio Stradivarius violin worth some 1.2m [pounds sterling]. Such was the agonising wait faced by violinist Min-Jin Kym, whose precious Strad was taken at a Pret a Manger cafe at London's Euston Station back in November 2010, along with a Peccatte bow worth 62,000 [pounds sterling] and another bow worth 5000 [pounds sterling].

One might imagine that after such an extended period--and the arrest of the thieves in 2011 without the discovery of the instrument --police would have abandoned the search. But Detective Chief Inspector Simon Taylor remained confident that the valuable and iconic instrument would be difficult to sell. His faith paid off in July when a violin found at a property in the Midlands was verified as the true article--despite disappointment earlier in the year when a violin suspected by Bulgarian police to be the stolen instrument was found to be a Stradivarius copy.

'We're absolutely delighted to have recovered the Stradivarius after a long and very complex investigation,' said DCI Taylor. 'Though it took some time to successfully locate and recover the violin, we were confident it had remained in the UK. I always maintained that its rarity and distinctiveness would make any attempt to sell it extremely difficult, if not futile, because established arts and antiques dealers would easily recognise it as stolen property.'

The violin and both bows were returned to their grateful owner intact and with only minimal damage--although the story serves as a warning to all unsuspecting musicians to keep their instruments close at all times.

Considering that the French composer Olivier Messiaen died more than 20 years ago, it may seem fairly unlikely that new works would still be popping up. Yet a recently discovered piece by the composer will be premiered as part of Sheffield's Music in die Round on November 2 and recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3. La fauvette passerinette was unearthed among Messiaen's sketches by scholar and pianist Peter Hill, who not only studied with the composer but has also recorded his complete piano music for Regis.

'This is an immensely exciting find--a substantial 15-minute piece for piano in the composer's birdsong style that dates from 1961,' said Hill. 'What emerged from deciphering the sketches is a work in an advanced state of completion, while the few passages still in composer's shorthand I was able to complete by cross-referencing to the birdsong notations Messiaen made in the spring of 1961.'

The work is one of several recent discoveries among the drafts and manuscripts of leading composers--including two works by Benjamin Britten premiered in Birmingham and London in June and August this year, two lost Elgar songs premiered at the Elgar Birthplace Museum in June, and an early forgotten piano sonata and lost hymn by Beethoven performed at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the University of Manchester, respectively, in October 2012.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A study undertaken at University College London and published in August has suggested that visual impact and stage presence are more important factors than sound quality when judging classical music competitions. The eye-opening research conducted by pianist Dr Chia-Jung Tsay among 1000 volunteers drawn from both professional musicians and novices, found that people shown silent videos of 10 international piano competitions could more easily pick out the winners than those who were given an audio track of the performances. Even more interestingly, those participants given both the video and audio managed around the same accuracy levels as those who judged only the audio.

'Regardless of levels of expertise, we still seem to be led primarily by visual information, even in this domain of music,' said Dr Tsay. 'Classical music training is often focused on improving the quality of the sound, but this research is about getting to the bottom of what is really being evaluated at the highest levels of competitive performance. We must be more mindful of our inclination to depend on visual information at the expense of the content that we [would normally consider] more relevant to our decisions.'

Given audiences' reliance on the visual, it should come as no surprise that the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's LumenoCity--two open-air events combining visual performance in the form of a light show with live orchestral playing--have attracted vast crowds. Audiences of 35,000 exceeded organisers' expectations by some 15,000 at the events held in Washington Park on August 3 and 4. Designed to welcome Louis Langree as the orchestra's next music director, the shows included 40 minutes of digital light projections, designed by brand consulting firm Landor Associates, on to the exterior of the orchestra's Music Hall. At a cost of $500,000 and involving six months of planning, the concerts were undoubtedly a gamble but paid off handsomely--and should generate still further interest for the orchestra when the performances are streamed online via YouTube from mid-September.

Smith, Charlotte

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Charlotte. "At long last, a violinist and her cherished million-pound Stradivarius are reunited." Gramophone, 15 Sept. 2013, p. 13. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A368848359/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c140e03. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A368848359

Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung
45.3 (May-June 2017): p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Poets & Writers, Inc.
http://www.pw.org/magazine
"I've been dreaming about my violin." Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung (Crown Publishing Group, April 2017) by Min Kym. First book, memoir. Agent: Annabel Merullo. Editor: Rachel Klayman. Publicist: Rebecca Welbourn.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 45, no. 3, 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A488192362/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cfcfbdc1. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A488192362

Gone by Min Kym review -- moving memoir of a former child prodigy; The story of the gifted virtuoso who grew up to international stardom -- and then her beloved violin was stolen
(Apr. 22, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Byline: RO Kwon

In Gone, Min Kym's memoir about her life as a violin soloist, she relates a possibly apocryphal legend about the French violinist Ginette Neveu, who was touring when her plane crashed into a mountain. She died, as did everyone else in the plane. In the wreckage, Neveu's corpse was discovered with her beloved Stradivarius still gripped in her hand. Kym, like Neveu, was a child prodigy who grew up to be a brilliant professional musician; also like Neveu, Kym played, and loved, a Stradivarius, one of just 449 in the world. But Kym lost her Stradivarius when she was 31 years old, a loss so terrible it left her unable to play the violin.

From age six, Kym hadn't gone a day without practising. When she had started learning to play the instrument, she "felt like a creature released, alive in herself for the first time". Even then, she says, "I knew I could play anything. Anything. This was not arrogance -- I was a shy child, reluctant to come forward, to give voice, to take centre stage -- but more simply that I had found, not only my home and my voice, but my element." Others agreed. Kym's chronicle of childhood glitters with the wunderkind's starry achievements: the first this, the youngest that. Concert soloist at 10 years old. Youngest pupil ever at the prestigious Purcell School. When she was 12, Kym was playing professionally in five to six concerts a year; at 13, she had her debut concerto with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. She performed with the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, won prizes, played in Madrid, Seoul, Bologna and Seville.

In this first part of Gone, it's fascinating how positive Kym is about playing music. One is more used to hearing artists complain about the difficulty of their passions, about how musicians, painters and writers aspire to what cannot quite be done, ever bedevilled by the gaps between human ability and the ideal. Though Kym does discuss the pressure and loneliness of having been a prodigy, a child set apart, she says that, when it came to the playing itself, "it wasn't a burden. It wasn't even a demand." She always washed her hands before lessons, to keep her violin clean, then returned at a run to the practice room, impatient to begin again. As she grew older and purchased increasingly beautiful violins, she often left the instrument out of its case between sessions. "Because I needed it near me," she explains. "It was me." (Compare this with George Enesco, for instance, the Romanian musician who called his violin his "intimate enemy".)

Kym likens her Strad to a child, a soulmate, a lover, a limb -- her love of it surpassed what she'd felt for any person

She was 21 when she was offered the chance to play a 1696 Stradivarius, one that turned out to be rare even for a Strad, unusual in build and weight. From the first stroke of her bow, she knew the violin to be hers: "It felt as if 300 years ago Stradivari had held his hands over a length of wood and fashioned this violin just for me, that all her life, my Strad had been waiting for me as I had been waiting for her." Kym sold her old violin, remortgaged her flat, bought the instrument, then, over the course of years, made tiny adjustments to make it exactly right. She shifted the bridge, the sound post, shaved the neck a millimetre at a time. It took three years for her to find the perfect bow. At last, she says, the violin became "absolute in its readiness ... just like an arm or a leg."

But it was a fragile instrument, and previously damaged. Kym didn't like to let it out of her sight. If she was sitting, she kept the strap around her ankle. She likens the Stradivarius to a child, a soulmate, a voice, a lover, a bridge, a limb. Her love of the violin surpassed what she'd felt for any person. Kym picked up a significant prize as well as recordings with Sony, and believes it wouldn't have been possible without the violin. "It made me weightless, limitless," she says. "I never questioned my existence ... There was not one single moment when I didn't want to play."

But the idyll ends. And by the time she relates what became of the violin, any question as to how the theft was a catastrophe has been dispelled. Soulmates are unique; insured or not, Kym's Stradivarius could not be replaced. Though the violin eventually is recovered from the thieves, it's too late. For financial reasons, Kym can't keep the instrument, and its loss is no less than the death of a great love; accordingly, the narrative becomes disordered, tenses shifting. A previously unmentioned close friend is dropped into the story, as is a childhood illness. "There are so many things to say, it's hard to know where to start, how to separate them all into bare paragraphs and sentences," Kym writes.

This reviewer, for one, could feel inclined to object to that "bare" (sentences are not bare; sentences possess magic), but Kym's achievement exceeds infelicities of prose. At one point in Gone, her mentor, Ruggiero Ricci, aged 85, has sold his violin of 50 years and retired to Palm Springs. "Shall I tell you something, Min? I've had three wives but only one violin," he says, and, thanks to Kym, we know what he means.

* Gone is published by Viking. To order a copy for [pounds sterling]11.24 (RRP [pounds sterling]14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pounds sterling]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pounds sterling]1.99. RO Kwon's novel Heroics will be published by Riverhead.

CAPTION(S):

Credit: Photograph: Orli Rose

Min Kym with her replacement violin.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gone by Min Kym review -- moving memoir of a former child prodigy; The story of the gifted virtuoso who grew up to international stardom -- and then her beloved violin was stolen." Guardian [London, England], 22 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490401220/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c685e251. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A490401220

MIN-JIN KYM'S VIOLIN SELLS FOR $2.1 MILLION
(Dec. 19, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 COMTEX News Network, Inc.
http://www.comtexnews.com
Dec 19, 2013 (WENN via COMTEX) -- A violin once stolen from classical musician MIN-JIN KYM has sold for $2.1 million (AGBP1.4 million) at auction.

The star was recently reunited with the 300-year-old Stradivarius following its discovery at a property in the Midlands, England more than two years after it was taken from her in a sandwich shop in north London.

Kym replaced the instrument after it was stolen, so the recovered violin was put up for auction in London on Wednesday (18Dec13) and it sold for $2.1 million.

A portion of the auction proceeds will reportedly be donated to the authorities who helped recover the valuable piece over the summer (13). (LR/WNBTI/ZN)

(c) 2013 WORLD ENTERTAINMENT NEWS NETWORK. All global rights reserved.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"MIN-JIN KYM'S VIOLIN SELLS FOR $2.1 MILLION." World Entertainment News Network, 19 Dec. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353395744/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ce5e1ce8. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A353395744

Violinist on 'cloud nine' at Stradivarius find: Acclaimed musician elated as prized 1696 violin stolen three years ago is recovered
(July 31, 2013): Regional News: p9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Byline: James Meikle

A riddle worthy of a detective novel, involving an internationally acclaimed violinist, her prized instrument stolen at a busy London station, and a false trail leading to Bulgaria, may now be nearing its conclusion.

The discovery of a 1696 Stradivarius worth pounds 1.2m, and two bows with a combined value of pounds 67,000, has left the musician Min-Jin Kym "on cloud nine" with an "incredible feeling of elation".

Her violin had been snatched by opportunist thieves in November 2010 while she was eating at a Pret a Manger cafe at Euston station, London.

Kim, 35, a world renowned classical musician who was born in South Korea, was recorded in a British Transport police video, saying: "This had been the instrument I had been playing on since I was a teenager, so it was a huge part of my identity for very many years."

The theft prompted a public appeal for help and the release of CCTV on BBC's Crimewatch programme.

In 2011 John Maughan was jailed for four and a half years at Blackfriars crown court for the theft. He and two accomplices had tried to sell the instrument for pounds 100 in an internet cafe not far from Euston. Two teenagers were also sentenced for their involvement.

This year investigations into reports that the violin could have been located in Bulgaria concluded that the instrument examined was not the 300-year-old antique but merely a replica training instrument that had been made no more than 100 years ago.

Now, however, experts are satisfied that the real thing and the two bows - a pounds 62,000 Peccatte bow and a pounds 5,000 bow made by the School of Bazin - have been recovered from a property in the Midlands. The instrument and bows are said to be intact with some "very minor" damage.

Kym said: "It's been a very difficult journey; I still can't quite believe quite what has happened. The loss of the instrument, and the acute responsibility I felt, was always at the back of my mind at every moment of the day.

"The theft was a crushing blow and the detectives in the case had always, quite rightly, been very careful not to give me false hope. When they told me the good news it didn't feel real."

Detective Chief Inspector Simon Taylor, of the British Transport police, said: "We're absolutely delighted to have recovered the Stradivarius violin after a long and very complex investigation. Though it took some time to successfully locate and recover the violin, we were confident it had remained in the UK.

"I always maintained that its rarity and distinctiveness would make any attempt to sell it extremely difficult, if not futile, because established arts and antiques dealers would easily recognise it as stolen property."

A spokesman from Lloyd's insurer Canopius said: "For Min-Jin Kym her violin is priceless and insuring it against theft can never reflect the emotional cost of her loss.

"It's great news that the violin has been found."

Captions:

Min-Jin Kym, 35, had played the 1696 Stradivarius - worth pounds 1.2m - since she was a teenager, and called its theft a crushing blow

Min-Jin Kym said she had an 'incredible feeling of elation' on hearing the Stradivarius had been recovered Photograph: EPA

James Meikle

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Violinist on 'cloud nine' at Stradivarius find: Acclaimed musician elated as prized 1696 violin stolen three years ago is recovered." Guardian [London, England], 31 July 2013, p. 9. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A338291275/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=653c03cc. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A338291275

Stradivarius Violin Is Stolen From London Snack Shop
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 The New York Times Company
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
Byline: ROBIN POGREBIN

The South Korean violinist Min-Jin Kym was eating at a sandwich shop in London on Nov. 29 when she noticed that her black violin case with a 300-year-old Stradivarius inside was missing.

To view this article at nytimes.com, click here: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/stradivarius-violin-is-stolen-from-london-snack-shop/

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stradivarius Violin Is Stolen From London Snack Shop." ArtsBeat: The Culture at Large, 24 Dec. 2010. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A245174699/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9a24e570. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A245174699

"Kym, Min: GONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b69c89d2. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Coghlan, Alexandra. "The lost Stradivarius." Spectator, 8 Apr. 2017, p. 34+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498477584/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2a4f78f. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Sanderson, Caroline. "Min Kym: Min Kym's soulmate was a 1696 Stradivarius--which she played in concert halls around the world--until the day it was stolen and her world came apart." The Bookseller, 10 Feb. 2017, p. 22+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481243880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b36f337. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Gardner, Charlotte. "Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung." Gramophone, June 2017, p. 100+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497671158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=be322209. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Smith, Charlotte. "At long last, a violinist and her cherished million-pound Stradivarius are reunited." Gramophone, 15 Sept. 2013, p. 13. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A368848359/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c140e03. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 45, no. 3, 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A488192362/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cfcfbdc1. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Gone by Min Kym review -- moving memoir of a former child prodigy; The story of the gifted virtuoso who grew up to international stardom -- and then her beloved violin was stolen." Guardian [London, England], 22 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490401220/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c685e251. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "MIN-JIN KYM'S VIOLIN SELLS FOR $2.1 MILLION." World Entertainment News Network, 19 Dec. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353395744/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ce5e1ce8. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Violinist on 'cloud nine' at Stradivarius find: Acclaimed musician elated as prized 1696 violin stolen three years ago is recovered." Guardian [London, England], 31 July 2013, p. 9. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A338291275/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=653c03cc. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Stradivarius Violin Is Stolen From London Snack Shop." ArtsBeat: The Culture at Large, 24 Dec. 2010. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A245174699/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9a24e570. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/03/min-kym-gone-girl-violin-life-unstrung-review-prodigy-passion
  Word count: 945

  Gone by Min Kym review – one prodigy’s passion for her violin

  The theft of Min Kym’s Stradivarius made worldwide headlines – but her autobiography shows that wasn’t all she’d lost in life
  Barbara Ellen

  Barbara Ellen

  Mon 3 Apr 2017 02.30 EDT
  Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 10.06 EST

  Min Kym: ‘Long-suppressed bursts of resentment crackle through the pages’.

  In 2010, violinist and erstwhile child prodigy, 31-year-old Min Kym was with her partner in a Pret A Manger at Euston station, when her 1696 Stradivarius was stolen from under the table. Kym was so devastated at the loss of “her” instrument, that she descended into a depression and, for a while, couldn’t bear to play. Three years later, the story hit the headlines again, when the Stradivarius was recovered. Seemingly, it was a wonderful fairy tale ending, though, as Kym details in this powerful bruising memoir, the reality was far more complex.

  Her entire identity seems to be wrapped up in it, her dark symbiotic twin – she calls it “the One”, her “soulmate”

  Billed as a memoir of “love, loss and betrayal”, Gone could easily have been subtitled “The rise and painful fall of a child prodigy”. Kym’s South Korean family relocated to Britain once her immense natural talent was discovered. From there, Kym’s achievements and accolades flowed like their own kind of beautiful albeit poignant music. At seven, she became the youngest person to win a place at the Purcell School of Music, by her early teens, she was performing with international orchestras. By the time the Stradivarius was stolen, Kym had an album ready for release and a world tour planned, and was hailed as one of the most talented violinists in the world.

  However, there was a price to pay – not least any semblance of a normal childhood. Already Kym’s Korean heritage, rooted in obedience, made her feel conflicted (Korean at home, English outside the home). Her mechanical engineer father was largely absent working, and you wouldn’t need a qualification in cod-psychology to posit the link to the series of charismatic demanding older men who became her tutors. In many ways, this was an occupational hazard – to play at Kym’s level, you need to be disciplined. However, Kym felt dominated, controlled, a “performing puppet”. Rebelling against one of her early tutors, she broods: “The little diamond was tired of being taken out and polished.” There were times when even her extraordinary potential felt like a burden: “It’s lying in wait for you like a dragon sleeping across the mouth of a cave.”
  Min Kym’s Stradivarius
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  Min Kym’s Stradivarius Photograph: British Transport Police/PA

  What appear to be long-suppressed bursts of resentment crackle through these passages – with Kym eventually, though only briefly and regretfully, erupting at the mother she adores. It’s no surprise when Kym reveals that she suffered from anorexia in youth. While another musician’s comment was the trigger (“No one wants to see a fat performer”), the disease seems bound up in, not only the grinding perfectionist pressure that Kym places upon herself, but also the loneliness and otherness she feels. As her prized mentor, US violinist, Ruggiero Ricci, tells her: “Only prodigies recognise other prodigies.”

  Kym’s love for music and composers (Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Prokofiev, Paganini, Mendelssohn) pulses through this book, providing an intriguing education for a layperson such as myself (There’s an album tie-in of Kym’s performances, if you’re interested – I know I am). However, at the core, there’s a passionate love story: the one between Kym and “her” Stradivarius – the violin she had to have, despite the fact that she had to remortgage her home to afford the then-£450,000 to buy it. Kym’s relationship with the instrument seems at once intoxicating and somewhat toxic. Her entire identity seems to be wrapped up in it, her dark symbiotic twin – she calls it “the One”, her “soulmate”.

  When the theft occurs it’s as devastating as it’s complicated. Kym is shaken when her partner at the time (another person she feels controlled by) seems keen to propagate the story that the violin was at her feet, not his, when it was stolen. After they split, in a weird twist, he’s at the centre of a deal, enabling Kym to buy back her recovered Stradivarius, but only for the briefest of moments before it’s re-sold. This is the essential tragedy and irony of the book – after everything that happens, Kym can’t even afford to keep “her” beloved violin, and is forced to give it up, and not even to another player, but to an investor. This, she says, is the nature of the industry now – instruments like her Stradivarius “don’t earn their keep in the concert hall, they earn their keep in the dark”.
  Violinist Min Kym: ‘My schoolgirl crush was Beethoven’s 4th’
  Read more

  The loss of the violin represents the “Gone” of this remarkable and original memoir, though only in the context of all the other things that are taken – Kym’s childhood, her future, her spirit, her trust in people, her sense of identity. How thrilling then that, eventually, Kym’s agonising attempts to recover are rewarded with another violin (an Amati) to love, and, with it, a sense that the future could be hers to own again

  • Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung is published by Viking (£14.99)

• Spectator
  https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/how-min-kyms-life-became-unstrung/
  Word count: 931

  How Min Kym’s life became unstrung
  Losing her Stradivarius was like losing a part of herself. The child prodigy describes her painful journey back to normality
  Alexandra Coghlan

  Alexandra Coghlan

  8 April 2017

  9:00 AM

  Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung Min Kym

  PenguinViking, pp.247, £14.99

  Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won’t find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules or YouTube videos. What you’ll get are news reports. Because one evening in 2010, when Kym was waiting for a train at Euston Station, her 300-year-old Stradivarius violin was stolen. Almost three years later it was recovered, and an ‘elated’ Kym was back in the papers, but the happy ending was more editorial convenience than truth. Now Kym herself has written a memoir in an attempt to explain what she really lost that day, and the impossibility of ever truly recovering it.

  Gone is an awkward book. The style shouts thriller — a relentless drumbeat of staccato sentences and long-trailed expectation — but the content is the discursive, drifting stuff of memoir. Being a child prodigy is a life that straddles genres, flirting with technical manual, self-help book and YA fiction on its journey to adult autobiography, but it doesn’t make for the easiest of reads, especially in first-time hands. Kym’s violin, as she repeatedly tells us, is her voice, but there’s a sense here of the author trying on another for size, one that — as yet — can’t manage much more than a whisper.

  ‘A Life Unstrung’: the subtitle contains a potent image, but one that, like so much else in this memoir, doesn’t really belong to its author. In shaping the book’s central idea, an elision between player and instrument, woman and object, she borrows cultural rhetoric that comes ready-loaded. When we read that ‘The violin was part of me and I part of the violin’, we think of Man Ray’s ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’ — the woman with a violin’s F holes in her back, the instrument on which the photographer plays his visual music; or of Magritte’s ‘La Decouverte’ — her flesh transforming into wood under the artist’s gaze; or even perhaps of the ghastly cover art for R. Kelly’s Black Panties album, in which the singer ‘plays’ a naked woman with a cello bow. We struggle to see clearly through to the timid pencil strokes of Kym’s own self-portrait.

  Because while this is a book about music, about the life of a child prodigy, a violin found and lost, it’s as much a book about being a woman. The two narratives are indivisible. Again and again as Kym tells her story, her prodigious talent becomes a vehicle for men to express themselves: something for teachers, dealers, conductors, fathers and lovers to appropriate and claim as their own. ‘She is a little diamond, and I want to be the one to polish her,’ says her professor — the first of many to see himself reflected back in her brilliance.

  And this is where things really do come into focus. Kym’s prose struggles under the weight of introspection, but supports her surrounding characters with neat efficiency. The puppyish young lover whose affection becomes stifling control; the expert-by-endeavour who cannot connect with the instinctive prodigy; Kym’s Korean family, who must learn to adapt to their unusual daughter — all are swiftly, skilfully drawn. It’s the book of a woman who has grown up watching rather than speaking out, translating action into thought rather than the reverse. ‘But I wasn’t strong enough’, is a recurring refrain — a weakness born of training and habit as much as the anorexia the author reveals in the closing pages — and one whose pliant passivity is only partly vanquished here.

  There’s a real appetite for books about the singularity of genius, and while Gone goes some way towards feeding that, returning three times to the question of what it is to be a prodigy, delivering darker answers with each iteration — ‘It’s a means to another’s end. There’s a price to pay, and that price is you’ — it is surprisingly light on music. We get the compulsion of playing, the ease of it, the urgency of it, but comparatively little about the repertoire that is generated by it. Kym could be a mathematician or a chess champion and the book would read much the same.

  Perhaps that’s the point; to be a prodigy is to be given a gift, not a choice, and to accept it is to become a curator, not necessarily an artist. Kym’s interest in music is that of the golfer’s in the courses he plays — functional, unquestioning. Her real passion is reserved for fellow violinists, Heifetz in particular, whose style she describes in language suddenly agile and precise.

  And what of the violin itself, the 1696 Stradivarius eventually restored to Kym, only to be torn away again, sold to appease the insurance company and dealers hungry to capitalise on its new notoriety? It remains an elusive symbol — a vessel, whose hollow body becomes the space into which Kym pours herself, conceals herself, reshaping her own embattled body in its image. ‘You’re the artist, not the violin,’ says Kym’s friend. But she’s not so sure, and by the end of this frustrating, intermittently fascinating book, neither are we.

• Financial TImes
  https://www.ft.com/content/3e948702-19f1-11e7-a266-12672483791a
  Word count: 766

  Gone by Min Kym — strings attached
  A gifted violinist’s memoir of loss and recovery is haunted by an enigmatic Stradivarius
  Min Kym

  Jonathan McAloon
  April 7, 2017

  Child prodigies are often treated as enigmas, even to themselves: capable but not yet wise enough to appreciate what their capabilities mean. Min Kym was one, and in her movingly uncertain memoir of obsession, love and loss, the only certainty is the violin: “I knew I could play anything. Anything. This was not arrogance.” That is, until her million-pound violin is stolen from her in Euston station, physically and psychologically blocking what should have been a brilliant career.

  Kym moved to London from South Korea as a child. Within three months of picking up a violin at the age of six she’d worked halfway through the Associated Board’s “Grade” system. At 10 she would be “a world-class violin soloist”. When she was 20, the legendary American Ruggiero Ricci — a former child prodigy himself — offered to teach her for free. But it is a year later that the young violinist, no longer a prodigy, makes the most significant relationship of her life.

  Stradivarius violins, which were made by the Cremonese luthier Antonio Stradivari in the 17th and 18th centuries, are popularly considered the finest ever made. The 500 that remain, at any rate, are the most valuable. Kym’s own, made in 1696 and having undergone multiple restorations, was worth just over £1m, and cost her £5,000 a year in upkeep alone. “It’s a thoroughbred,” a violin maker tells her. “They’re sometimes temperamental!” When Kym is 31 her Strad makes the news when it is stolen from her. What follows is a period of clinical depression during which she can barely get out of bed. More importantly for her, she loses her connection to music.

  Being a prodigy, as well as being “brought up to obey” in a Korean household, established a pattern of forfeiting control to a series of mentors, minders and partners. This filtered down to her instrument. “Always,” she says, “the violin came first.” When the press call her negligent, she isn’t upset for herself. She feels “as if I had been a bad mother to my violin”.

  Like a thoroughbred horse, a Stradivarius’s appeal is as enigmatic as it is obvious. We might find it strange that Kym should put her instrument before herself, and see her career as dependent on a violin. But the book translates what these violins mean to players who have felt their gift matched by famous objects that have “gone through time” and will then outlive their owners.

  Kym often has an easy, elegant way of describing music, which is refreshing for a musical reader used to seeing it badly articulated on the page. “Lightness of [ . . .] thought”, we are told, was the key to a famous virtuoso’s flying staccato technique. On the mechanics of sound production, Kym describes a violin, once bowed and about to bear a note, as “Now full”.

  When practising, “Your fingers have to become like London taxi drivers”. Losing concentration while performing, “You’re suddenly gone”. The prose does sometimes go out of tune: Kym uses the phrase “build up to a crescendo”, which is a fairly common solecism but not one a musician should be guilty of. Music doesn’t build to a crescendo. The crescendo is the build. But then, it feels stupid critiquing someone who will have more natural understanding of a crescendo than any critic.

  Most importantly, Gone communicates what it is like to “be a natural and yet quite unnatural”; to perceive from inside this “outside”. The strangeness of being told, for instance, that you will outgrow your adult teacher within the year as an eight-year old, or of being given care of near-priceless violins as a teenager living on a Northolt council estate.

  Most Strads have names. It is devastating yet fitting that Kym’s is now named the “Euston Strad” after the incident that wrecked its owner’s life. She gets another, this one of a better pedigree, having been made while Stradivari was doing his finest work, but badly maintained. She can’t love it. But since then she has fallen again, this time for a violin made by Stradivari’s teacher, Amati. We hope, for her sake, that this will be a less destructive relationship.

  Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung, by Min Kym, Viking, RRP£14.99/Crown, RRP$25, 256 pages

• Arts Desk
  http://www.theartsdesk.com/books/sunday-book-min-kym-gone-girl-violin-life-unstrung
  Word count: 891

  Sunday Book: Min Kym - Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung
  A tragic musical love affair
  by Adam SweetingSunday, 02 April 2017
  Share
  Min Kym: 'Talent is a burden you can't throw off'

  “What’s it like to be a child prodigy?” is a question asked by violinist Min Kym several times in the course of this fascinating, agonising memoir. There’s no simple answer, but this description rings true: “There’s that peculiar sensation of feeling completely normal within yourself, but acutely aware that you are different.”

  And it’s something you never entirely grow out of. As she says later on, “Talent is a burden you can’t throw off.” Music came to her with ridiculous ease, but other aspects of her life have proved more problematic. The younger of two daughters of a Korean family living in London, Kym’s spectacular musical gifts were evident from the moment she first picked up a violin – “I knew right away that holding a violin, playing a violin, was not simply for me, but it was me,” she writes.

  At age seven, she became the youngest-ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. At eight, she was attending the Royal College of Music and was taken on as a pupil by the renowned Russian teacher Felix Andrievsky (“A dead ringer for David Suchet’s Hercule Poirot,” she observes). At 11 she won the Mozart International Competition in Bologna, and later would be awarded the Heifetz Prize and make recordings for Sony.

  When she was 21, she met the love of her life. It was a 1696 Stradivarius violin, from the revered fiddle-maker’s so-called “Long Pattern” period, and Kym and the violin fell into a swooning, perfect synchronicity. This was “the violin that would be the key to my art,” she reflects. “This was marriage till death us do part, made in heaven right here on earth.”

  The decade she spent with this soul-mate, constructed from wood and glue, knocked about a bit over the centuries yet imbued with some almost supernatural magic, found her reaching ecstatic heights of musicianship. She gives much credit to another teacher, Ruggerio Ricci, and to Gerald Drucker, the former double-bass player with the Philharmonia Orchestra who became her guide to the tricks and pitfalls of the professional musician’s life. Yet it’s her relationship with the Strad which has come to define her life (so far, at least – she isn’t yet 40). It reaches an apotheosis when she records the Brahms Violin Concerto, in particular its shiveringly poignant slow movement: “Love... This is what my violin was made for. This is what I was made for.”

  In admirably lucid and uncluttered prose, she describes her intimacy with the instrument in almost scandalous detail. She recalls how a conductor came into her dressing room before a concert and began idly plucking its strings, and her shock “that he should touch me so, that he felt he had the right...” She cossets it and adores it for its imperfections, which “were what made my violin my violin, what made it almost human... I loved my violin, but I also had compassion for it.”

  But you know what they say about the course of true love, and her passionate affair was doomed to a brutal ending. Her violin was stolen while she sat in a Pret à Manger cafe on Euston station, and its loss hit her like a bereavement. While the search for the lost fiddle became an international cause célèbre, it stopped her life in its tracks, leaving her unable to play music or even get out of bed. It took her years to thaw out from a kind of psychological hibernation, until, in the final pages, we find her playing Brahms again and tentatively learning to live with the new violin in her life, an Amati instrument of rare quality.

  Kym artfully sweeps us up in her grand passion, using it like a magician’s misdirection to lead us away from the yawning fault-lines in her life. She describes the regimented formality of her Korean family, which led to her natural lack of assertiveness, a compulsion to do what other people wanted (“the pattern of acceptance I have always fallen into”). The theft of the violin is interwoven with her account of a disastrous affair with an ambitious and manipulative cellist called Matt. She was with him at Euston station on the fateful day, and she portrays the theft as a convergence of inevitable forces, the thieves prowling for prey while her relationship with Matt disintegrates into a maelstrom of resentment and miscommunication.

  We’re nearly at the end of the story when she suddenly says by the way, did I tell you I was anorexic throughout my most of my childhood and teens? “It seemed normal at the time, what one did, the price you paid.” It’s like looking behind the curtain and finding a tiny, timid creature curled up in the corner, blinded by the light. Kym would probably feel some sympathy with John Lennon’s comment, “genius is pain.”

  Gone: A Girl, a Violin, A Life Unstrung by Min Kym (Penguin, hardback, eBook and audio download, £10.49)

• Idle Woman
  https://theidlewoman.net/2017/04/30/gone-min-kym/
  Word count: 1144

  Gone: Min Kym
  April 30, 2017
  Gone
  Min Kym

  ★★★★

  A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung

  As someone with no musical ability whatsoever, I’ve never quite understood the bond that musicians have with their instruments. Now, however, I’m a little closer to appreciating that blend of physical and emotional reliance, thanks to this extraordinary and frank memoir. You may not recognise Min Kym’s name, but you will have heard her story: she is the brilliant violinist whose Stradivarius was stolen at Euston Station in 2010. This beautifully-written book is overshadowed throughout by that theft hanging in the future, but it is also a thoughtful and very poignant exploration of what it means to be a child prodigy and a top-flight soloist – and the psychological cost to be paid.

  Kym is the younger of two sisters, born in Korea to an engineer father who was posted to London when she was small. Sitting in on her sister’s piano lessons, Kym itched to have music lessons of her own and, when a slot came up for violin classes, she leapt at the chance. Her talent was immediately obvious and staggering. In the week before her first class, she taught herself to play simple tunes; in the first month, she’d shot through the first four Grades. By the age of six, she was an acknowledged talent; by eight, she had outgrown the abilities of the teachers at the Purcell Music School and was attending biweekly classes at the Royal College of Music. She was thoroughly committed to her craft: both technically superb and creatively inspired. Concerts followed; there were travels around the world; an increasingly distinguished roster of teachers and mentors; two CDs. This is the stuff of the artist’s biography in a concert programme: the facts.

  There’s always the danger, with this sort of book, that the author’s brilliance becomes wearing: that the reader is put off either by a parade of dazzling arrogance, or by false modesty. Kym is guilty of neither. What makes this memoir so appealing (even for those who are blissfully ignorance of the mechanics of music) is the way that she focuses on the emotional toll such a life takes on a young and unformed personality. She speaks of the psychological strain of being responsible for her family relocating back to London from Korea, when her father’s work took him home (I was reminded of Sergei Polunin’s similar situation). She writes about the way that a young prodigy can be – consciously or not – exploited by those around her, who see her as a way to make their own names.

  She dwells on the loneliness of being a child whose only real relationship is with her violin – a partnership that brings unimaginable joy and satisfaction, but one that leaves her on the outside of the standard teenage experience. Yet, to some degree, that’s compensated by the sheer rightness of playing. Her description of what it felt like to hold a violin, to play, is hugely evocative:

  Everything about it seemed so easy, so natural … There was a normality to it that seemed completely familiar… I had found, not only my home and my voice, but my element. I could swim in this world. I could dive and soar. I could ride crests and float down streams, swim with or against any current. I felt like a creature released, alive in herself for the first time.

  Kym is technically very advanced for her age, but emotionally rather naive, and she admits it. Her story offers a depressing series of examples in which the men around her (teachers, lovers etc.) try to ‘possess’ her, which is a sobering reflection of the intense bonds formed in the music industry. Indeed, there are points when I marvelled that she felt able to be so open about her relationships, as she certainly doesn’t use rose-tinted glasses. And she writes about the intense connection that she developed with her violin, the famous Stradivarius, made in 1696. By the time you reach the day of the theft itself, you understand the incredibly strong bond between Kym and her Strad: it probably isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that it felt like a child being snatched from her mother. Those who followed the story in the press will have some idea how the story ends, but I will say only that it’s more complicated than the articles made it sound. More complicated and far more poignant.

  I was immensely impressed by the quality of Kym’s writing. At first I suspected there must be a ghostwriter, but there was no sign of anyone else’s name on the copyright page. Her eloquence is heartbreaking. She takes you by the hand and leads you through all the joys and sorrows of her life – even if I was a bit dubious about her vividly detailed memories of times when she was six or seven – and you end up completely emotionally involved. The book may have been conceived as a publicity aid – Kym is thinking about going back into solo performing, and this can’t do her profile any harm at all – but I feel it’s more than a cynical marketing tool. Even if there is, inevitably, a tie-in album (but many books would be better for being sold with a soundtrack). Too much heart and soul has gone into it, and it ends up being an absorbing memoir that focuses both on the particulars of her own life and the general challenges of great ability.

  This comes thoroughly recommended, even to those who would normally avoid memoirs. As I said, this book goes beyond memoir: it’s an exploration of how we treat prodigies, what we expect of them, and how these remarkably talented people are often left – at a very young age – to deal with pressures that would crack a stronger spirit. I saw parallels in Kym’s experience both to Polunin, as I said, and to Max Cencic, both of whom have spoken about the challenges of being in the public eye from a very young age. Yes, I’m now tempted to listen to Kym’s last CD (with the Strad), even if it is Brahms, who’s normally way out of my comfort zone; and I’m also interested to see what she does next.

  Buy the book

  I received this book from Penguin in exchange for a fair and honest review.

  And here is Kym again, with violin in hand (I presume it’s the Strad but no doubt a horde of violin aficionados will rush to correct me if I’m wrong).

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