"After our family, now every family in Korea has a trio," reports Pianist Myung-Whun Chung, 21, smiling at his own youthful hyperbole. With no exaggeration, however, it can be said that the Chungs rank in the forefront of this century's gifted musical families. Each of the seven young Chungs, aged 19 to 33, is a trained musician. Six have won prizes, two were child prodigies, and the three who were once the family's own fireside trio are now solo artists.
The best known of the Korean family Chung, Violinist Kyung-Wha, set the standard in 1967, when she shared top honors with Pinchas Zuckerman in the important Leventritt International Competition in New York City. She was 19. In 1971 Cellist Myung-Wha, then 25, took first place in the Geneva International Competition. Last July, Myung-Whun was second-place winner at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow, an achievement he quickly followed up with an impressive debut recital in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall two weeks ago.
Six Myungs. Because six of the Chungs have the first name Myung (which means "bright, shining like a star"), and even Kyung shares her middle name, Wha, with a sister, individual members are identified to outsiders by the instrument they play.* "Name choosing in Korea is not an easy matter," observes Pianist-Brother Myung-Whun. "A parent just doesn't go to a phone directory. You go to a specialist in making names, maybe a fortuneteller. I'm happy my parents went to the trouble to do it right."
Music surrounded the Chungs from the beginning. Their father is a businessman whose enterprises have included operating the Korean restaurant at the Seattle World's Fair and running a mushroom plantation. Their mother loved music, and each child began piano lessons by five. The children agree that they immediately took to music, if not to the piano. Myung-Wha used to fall asleep at the keyboard until one day her mother turned up with a cello and a cello teacher. "I had never heard a cello," she recalls. A year and a half later, at eleven, she became one of the first people in Korea to perform publicly a cello solo. An uncle brought five-year-old Kyung-Wha a quarter-size violin. In a week she could play anything on it by ear and carried it everywhere. Only Myung-Whun remained at the piano.
"I don't know why we are so determined," says Kyung-Wha. "But our family dislikes anything in between." The habit of toil was instilled early. At home, the children would gather hi one large room in a communal practice for the contests they were encouraged to enter. Myung-Whun, the next to youngest, played his first concerto at seven with the Seoul Philharmonic. Still, he considers himself a "late starter."