Since its founding in 2011, Dallas Chamber Symphony has made hosting an instrument competition an important part of the orchestra’s programming. After producing several piano competitions, the orchestra is launching the Dallas International Violin Competition, with its final round held on June 20 at Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District.
“We saw it as integral to our long-term plan of building an audience, a local community interested in seeing national and international talent who might not otherwise have a reason to visit Dallas,” said Richard McKay, Dallas Chamber Symphony’s Music and Artistic Director.
McKay is proud of the success winners of the piano competition have enjoyed since performing in Dallas. Kenny Broberg won silver at the 2017 Cliburn Competition and Jonathan Mamora made his Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Recital Hall on May 4.
“It’s easy to see how many of the participants of the event parlay their experience here in Dallas into continued professional achievement,” McKay said. “The next obvious choice is those instruments with very strong solo traditions of solo performances would be violin, perhaps cello, perhaps some others.’
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The orchestra used its experience of producing a piano competition to develop a violin competition, understanding that the culture of the violin scene is completely different from the piano scene.
“As an orchestra, we need to be more mature and have a more solid foundation to really be able to execute and build a complicated event like this in an instrument and on an instrument that is not traditionally represented in a competition like piano is,” McKay said.
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The 12 participants are ages 18-35 and hail from around the world, including Japan, Ukraine, and South Korea.
“Most of them are very young. They are on the tail-end of graduate performance degrees, or many of them have emerged from graduate programs and are starting solo careers,” McKay said. “There are others who have not had that first experience with an orchestra yet and this could be a breakthrough moment for them.”
The competition began June 14 with the quarterfinals and semifinals taking place at the Arlington ISD Center for the Performing Arts. In the quarterfinals, violinists play a concerto with a pianist playing the orchestral piano reduction.
“They check in the first day and they’ll draw for performance order and from that performance order, they get a custom itinerary just for them which shows them all the rooms they can rehearse in during the day. There’s scheduled time to work with either a staff accompanist that we provide to them or time for them to work with their own self-appointed accompanist, if they prefer,” McKay said.
The semifinalists perform a 20-minute unaccompanied solo recital program. On June 16, three finalists, Chaewon Kim, Sarah Ma and Jaewon Wee, were selected. They will perform the concerto from the quarterfinals, accompanied by the Dallas Chamber Symphony led by guest conductor Jim Stopher. Beginning in the morning of June 19, the finalists will have three rehearsals with the orchestra before the final round performance.
“I think it’s wonderful for the orchestra to have more opportunities to work with guest conductors. It’s good for the orchestra to have more opportunities to play a concert of any sort and this competition is a whole extra orchestra concert for our ensemble each and every year. That increases our season by 20%, just like that,” McKay said. “It’s major growth for us.”
In addition to three jurors deciding who will win first, second and third prize prizes, the audience will get to pick their favorite for an audience choice award.
“Audiences will get to vote,” McKay said, adding none of the awards are decided by the orchestra’s staff or musicians. “I don’t vote. No one at DCS votes. It’s entirely independent.”
Besides winning a $2,500 cash prize, the first prize winner will perform with Dallas Chamber Symphony during its 2023-2024 season.
“We can expect to see the winning violinist next season on a different solo piece than what people will hear during the finals,” McKay said. “Because so many of these violinists perform really large concertos, meaning for a large orchestra, we treat the competition as an excuse to scale up once a year and have a full orchestra onstage. When they come back for their second performance, we’ll probably do something similar to what we did with Jonathan Mamora: program a chamber orchestra piece that’s a bit more fitted to the venue. That’s great because there’s so much wonderful repertoire that’s built for that kind of orchestra that never gets played.”
Audiences at the finals will have a chance to witness the virtuosity of these top violinists and see how they interact with an orchestra.
“It’s great fun. There’s the drama of the competition playing out in front of them,” McKay said. “You’ve got three beautiful pieces performed by three amazing violinists with a really exceptional orchestra in an environment that is acoustically wonderful.”
Learn more about the competition: Dallas International Violin Competition
Learn more: Dallas Chamber Symphony
