If Asians are not embraced in the arts, how do we counteract being Othered? Throughout our conversation, we discussed the importance of artistic connection and creating a space to belong for ourselves. 

Current media heightens racial tensions without providing solutions. In response, I am thrilled to share a point of view from a Korean-American violinist, as a daughter of dry cleaners, a world-class chamber musician, and an activist creating belonging in the concert music world.

Hyeyung Yoon: In Korean, there’s a word called gohyang. It means your homeland, your hometown. Korea will always be my gohyang. But I have claimed the United States as my home now. This is where I work, this is where I live, this is where I have my family.

I think back to my ornithologist father-in-law wondering aloud, “How was Brahms able to create music that sounds like the vastness of nature?”

My daughter and I arrived at Pilbong, a village in South Jeolla Province in South Korea, after traveling around the country for about a month.

We were so glad to have violinist Hyeyung Yoon as our special guest in Episode 4. When the Skyros Quartet was in graduate school, we were mentored by the Chiara String Quartet, where Hyeyung played violin for 18 years. We had a great conversation with her about performance energy, and about the Korean performance tradition of madang.

“Most people have two lives, but I think I’ve had three and am on my fourth,” said professional violinist Hyeyung Yoon.Yoon knows what it means to be successful. As the second violinist of the internationally renowned Chiara String Quartet, Yoon traveled the world and was recognized for her bold performance methods.

As such ensembles go, the Chiara String Quartet was a bright but relatively brief candle. It gave a farewell concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon, after 18 years of existence and soon after its star turn as quartet in residence at the museum in 2015-16.

The Chiara String Quartet has dedicated itself to finding ways of making the musical experience exciting and engaging. In a recent project, the quartet recorded all of Béla Bartók’s quartets from memory and performed the complete cycle over two nights on September 7 and 8 at the 2016 Ravinia Festival.

Aside from soloists, it’s safe to say most classical musicians almost always have their sheet music close at hand. But the young players in the Chiara String Quartet have challenged themselves to perform and record iconic compositions from memory.

Chiara performs these pieces from memory — even on the recording. Lifting the music off the page results in viscerally robust performances that combine acute precision of ensemble with tremendous freedom.

The title of this disc is literally true: the Chiara Quartet plays from memory.

During a recent rehearsal, Rebecca Fischer, the first violinist of the Chiara String Quartet, played with her eyes half closed as she led her fellow members, the violinist Hyeyung Julie Yoon, the violist Jonah Sirota and the cellist Gregory Beaver, in the simmering slow movement of Brahms’s second string quartet.

You go to a concert and see a string quartet looking like most every other string quartet — until it dawns on you they’re not looking at music. WRTI’s Susan Lewis talks to the Chiara String Quartet, who plays all the Bartók string quartets, and more, from memory.

When the Chiara String Quartet performs all of Bartok’s six string quartets by heart next week at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, it believes it will accomplish a feat no other group of musicians has ever attempted.

In the Chiara players’ skilled hands, the brooding opening Allegro of the C minor Quartet takes on an almost choreographic sense of emotional narrative, fuelled by a soloistic collective voice that places the emphasis firmly on cantabile espressivo rather than knife-edge vertical precision.

Aside from soloists, it’s safe to say most classical musicians almost always have their sheet music close at hand. But the young players in the Chiara String Quartet have challenged themselves to perform and record iconic compositions from memory.