Air on a C String
The first in a series of excerpts from Jung A Kim’s debut concert on Nathan’s cello: a program we’ll be unpacking piece by piece over the coming weeks, each fragment revealing a different facet of the instrument’s voice, and of Jung A’s extraordinary gift.
The concert itself was an all-French affair, drawn from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: a repertoire as demanding as it is luminous.
We open with Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane (Gypsy), written a century ago for the great female violin virtuoso Jelly d’Aranyi, and fiendishly difficult. Transposed to cello, it edges toward the unplayable. And yet Jung A Kim, our pocket-rocket prodigy, plays it as though it were written for her all along.
This first excerpt puts the spotlight on the cello’s G string. On a violin, the G is the lowest string in the instrument’s register. But the cello goes deeper: a C string, tuned a fifth below the G. In fact, every string on the cello sits a full octave below its violin counterpart, which is precisely why hearing Tzigane reborn down here, in this deeper register, feels like meeting an old piece for the first time.
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