Yoonie Han, winner of the 2011 Washington International Piano Competition, has sought new experiences ever since winning the Korea National Music Competition at age 15 and subsequently fending for herself in the United States. The vivacious pianist has chosen to perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at her Kennedy Center debut simply because it is a new piece for her and one she has always wanted to perform. She began pursuing the arts as a child. Her first choice was ballet, but she was thrown out of the class at age 10 because she was so fat the boys couldn’t lift her. Her next choice, the piano, proved far more successful.
“I was 14 when my father became an exchange professor at Rutgers University,” she said. “He had always wanted a son, so being a traditional South Korean family, he and my mother decided to return home when my brother was born. I chose to remain and move to New York. Because I was too young to get an apartment lease, my English tutor became my guardian.”
| Onstage |
| Yoonie Han |
| Where: Kennedy Center Terrace Theater |
| When 7:30 p.m. Wednesday |
| Info: Free at the door on a first-come, first-served basis. |
Yoonie enrolled at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and quickly began accumulating the kinds of generous friends who have helped her along the way. Only one of a handful of pianists there, she grew attached to her classmates from many countries. Her host family continues to keep in regular touch and even traveled to Boston for her debut there.
After graduating from Curtis, she earned her master’s degree at Juilliard and began amassing dozens of honors that have introduced her to major cities in this country and Europe. Currently, she is pursuing a doctor of musical arts at Stony Brook SUNY and an artist diploma at the Universite de Montreal.
Along with the Washington International Competition sponsored by the Friday Morning Music Club, Yoonie won the First Prize and the Audience Prize at the Fulbright Concerto Competition earlier this year. It will send her on a concert tour the spring of 2012 to Los Angeles, Miami, London and Germany.
“All my awards have great meaning,” she said. “I love competing because you meet so many people and have such wonderful host families. The one I had in Mississippi said I was like their daughter, but they couldn’t pronounce Yoonjung, my Korean name, so they called me Yoonie. I’ve used it ever since.
Yoonie is such a people person that strangers are drawn to her instantly. Many become part of her life. There is the computer expert who traveled from California to attend a competition. He had not known of her previously, but he was so struck by her talent that he volunteered to set up her website, her YouTube performances and her Wikipedia page.
“When I’m not practicing, she and I have fun cooking and going shopping. In the evening, we watch Korean drama on YouTube. When I come back to the Kennedy Center for the second concert in this series, I’ll play some pieces from the Spanish program that I’m performing at the Phillips Collection in January,”
