Of the many young violinists contending for space in the marketplace, Bomsori Kim is among the most talented, and here, she lives up to the marketing device of presenting her with the single name Bomsori. The idea of the Violin on Stage title is to offer pieces connected to opera and ballet, and Bomsori buttresses it by referring to her earlier desire to become a singer. It certainly would have made sense a century ago, and it makes sense now for the kind of violinist Bomsori is, with an ability to project soaring melodic lines and an extraordinary rich tone in the lower register of the violin. She has some operatic corkers here, not least the Carmen Fantasie of Franz Waxman, from the film Humoresque, perhaps the high point of Hollywood composition. However, it is not so much the concept that wins listeners over here as the sheer beauty of Bomsori's playing. She focuses to an unusual degree on Wieniawski, who fits her style perfectly. Sarasate, who wrote a lot of operatic fantasies, has a sentimental tinge that does not fit her so well and is ignored. The Wieniawski Fantasia on Themes from Gounod's Faust, Op. 20, is here and furnishes a showstopper finale, but the other Wieniawski pieces aren't connected to opera or ballet and don't fit Bomsori's theme. They are, though, superb, often lying in the realm of gutsy G string playing and low double-stopping that makes this violinist's sound so distinctive. She is also excellent in the extended lines of the Méditation from Thaïs. Bomsori gets excellent support from the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic, which knows this music well, and from conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, with whom she has worked effectively in the past. A Warsaw audience of Wieniawski's time would have recognized in Bomsori exactly what she is: a major star in the making.
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