As a piano accompaniment shattered the silence in Cochran Chapel, Lucy Jung ’18 drew her bow across her violin and opened Antonín Dvorák’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53, with a triple-stop chord, where Jung played three strings simultaneously. According to Jung, the first parts of the piece went particularly well for her.
Jung said, “I thought that the beginning and a lot of the slow parts went well because it was easier to practice those because I didn’t have to run through it multiple times or anything like that. But, for the fast parts or the double stops, I found it really hard to get back under my fingers [because] I really need consistent practice for that.”
Jung, a Senior from Seoul, South Korea, has been playing violin for 12 years. She studies with Min Jung Suh in Seoul and Peter Zazofsky at Boston University. Jung is involved with many music commitments both on and off campus such as the Academy Symphony and Chamber Orchestras here at Andover and summer programs like Tanglewood and the Aspen Music Festival and School.
Jung originally picked this piece over the summer when she was searching for a suitable piece for college applications and auditions, and spent many hours rehearsing it. The concerto was a balance of lyrical and technical, including sections with slow tempos and long notes as well as sections with fast runs and loud chords.
“I am into pieces that are going to be loud and powerful, so I thought that Dvorák was perfect because it was a really good balance of pretty and slow. There were some slow parts, and most of it was really loud; [it] had a lot of double stops and all of that,” said Jung.
