If you ask Byeol Kim if she can sing, she’ll insist with a laugh that she can’t. But she has learned to produce on the keyboard what she can’t produce with her vocal cords, leading to her being called “an operatic singer on piano.”
That descriptor, from a review in Cleveland Classical, is the highest compliment Kim has ever been paid, she says. “For the rest of my life, that’s what I’m going to always want to be called.”
Hear it for yourself on Sunday, November 2, when the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park performs Carmina Burana and Rhapsody in Blue in Steinmetz Hall at Dr. Phillips Center. Kim will perform Rhapsody in Blue, the standard by George Gershwin that is said to be a musical portrait of early 20th century Manhattan. Showtime will be at 3 p.m.
As her fingers meet the keys, Kim says that she imagines the tones communicating as a human voice. The message that she shares must be sung, not banged, despite the percussive nature of her instrument. She asks: “Honestly, when you don’t know how to sing at the piano, can you really say you’re a pianist?”
Kim, who started playing piano at age 5 in her native Korea, came to the United States for graduate school, earning a master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and artist diplomas from the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and Rice University in Houston. She received a doctorate at Northwestern University.
Kim’s career has been storied. She’s a Steinway Artist and has won numerous prestigious piano competitions. Most recently she notched the Astral Artists National Competition, followed in 2020 by the Digital Challenge Award for an original animation-based collaboration.
The recognitions feel especially validating because “I don’t think I got the perfect education growing up,” she says. “I didn’t go to all those prep schools. I didn’t go to an arts high school. I think I was a pretty late starter.”
Since joining the Rollins College music staff in 2023, Kim—who describes herself as “a musical firestarter”—works to help her students discover their “own voices, their own artistry. Know who you are as a person because that’s going to show in the music.”
Dr. Phillips Center is located at 445 South Magnolia Avenue, Orlando. For more information, visit drphillipscenter.org or call 407.358.6603.
