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IMG ARTISTS & ENTICOTT MUSIC MANAGEMENT WELCOME VIOLINIST KAREN GOMYO TO ITS ROSTER FOR GENERAL MANAGEMENT

IMG Artists is delighted to welcome violinist Karen Gomyo to its roster for general management. Karen will be represented by Agnieszka Mikus and, in association with Enticott Music Management, Kathryn Enticott.

Praised as, “a first-rate artist of real musical command, vitality, brilliance and intensity” (The Chicago Tribune), Karen possesses a rare ability to captivate and connect intimately with audiences through her deeply emotional and heartfelt performances. With a flawless command of the instrument and an elegance of expression, she is one of today’s leading violinists.

This season will see her debuts with both the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig with Semyon Bychkov and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland with Lio Kuokman.  She will make her highly-anticipated returns to the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra with frequent collaborator Jakub Hrůša; Mozarteumorchester Salzburg; BBC Philharmonic Orchestra; Gulbenkian; Orquesta Sinfónica de Bilbao; Vancouver Symphony; and Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, Tasmanian and West Australian symphony orchestras. Known for her commitment to contemporary music and new commissions, Karen will give the world premiere of Xi Wang’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra commission, Year 2020: Concerto for Trumpet, Violin and Orchestra with the Orchestra, trumpeter Tine Ting Helseth and conductor Fabio Luisi in February 2024

Karen said, “I am thrilled and honored to be joining the IMG Artists family, in association with Enticott Music Management, collaborating with two of the most brilliant managers, Agnieszka Mikus and Kathryn Enticott. I feel extremely grateful to have found an artistic home within this wonderfully enthusiastic, open-minded, forward-thinking, and compassionate team. With their unparalleled leadership and team spirit, combined with their curiosity and understanding of the individual artist’s needs and visions, I couldn’t ask for better partners to embark on this new journey with!”

Agnieszka and Kathryn said, “It is an immense pleasure for us to begin our work with Karen Gomyo, a violinist of astonishing musical depth and creativity. We have been inspired by the countless ideas we have exchanged since our first meeting with Karen.  She is a brilliant communicator, both on and off the concert platform and we are so happy to be a part of her professional journey,  bringing her vision and ambitions to fruition.”

Born in Tokyo, Karen began her musical career in Montréal and New York, She studied under the legendary pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School before continuing her studies at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and New England Conservatory.

Highlights of recent seasons include Karen’s subscription debuts with the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Orquesta Nacional de España, the Czech Philharmonic and Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Karen also returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel at the Hollywood Bowl, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in Paris under Mikko Franck and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln with Cristian Macelaru.

As a passionate chamber musician, Karen has had the pleasure of performing with artists such as Olli Mustonen, Leif Ove Andsnes, Enrico Pace, James Ehnes, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Daishin Kashimoto, Emmanuel Pahud, Julian Steckel, the late Heinrich Schiff, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, and guitarist Ismo Eskelinen with whom she has recorded the duo album Carnival on Bis Records.

Karen Gomyo makes Rome debut with Semyon Bychkov on the podium

April 2022

Gomyo makes her debut with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia conducted by Semyon Bychkov.

“Gomyo was extraordinary” in her subscription debut with the New York Philharmonic – the New York Times

November 18, 2021

“The soloist, Karen Gomyo, making her Philharmonic subscription series debut, conveyed with richly warm and textured sound the ruminative quality of a lyrical line that keeps trying to take clear shape. Yet Gomyo pressed below the surface to suggest that this music was not simply sad, but truly grief-stricken.

A noble yet still dark Passacaglia slow movement leads to a vehement cadenza, and then a Burlesque finale. Here the bitter, almost hostile, ironic Shostakovich seems to come through in episodes of blaring fanfares and faux-triumphant marches. The orchestra captured it with brilliant sharpness, and Gomyo was extraordinary, dispatching the tangle of technical challenges with fervor and command.”

-Review by Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times

Karen Gomyo at the Hollywood Bowl with Gustavo Dudamel

August 26, 2021

Karen Gomyo performs with the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl with Gustavo Dudamel conducting.

“A spectacular debut” with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

February 2020

“Karen Gomyo, making a spectacular debut with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, managed it triumphantly.

The opening lament poured out of her in an unbroken wave of controlled energy, concentrated and intense, and she pirouetted her way through the ghoulish jig of the Scherzo as though performing a high-wire act. Her cadenza, coming out of darkly controlled Passacaglia, was unblinkingly focused, leading into a finale of white hot mania.”

– The Times (17th Feb. 2020)

Review: The Scotsman

“A Violinist in the Circus” – Karen Gomyo makes New Year’s Eve debut with DSO Berlin

December 2019

Making her debut with Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Karen Gomyo brought in the New Year alongside Cristian Macelaru and the Roncalli Circus.

Alongside the circus, Karen performed pieces by Astor Piazzolla: Libertango; Fritz Kreisler: Liebesleid; and Niccolò Paganini: Il carnevale di Venezia.

Article: Berliner Morgenpost

Karen Gomyo debuts with Philharmonia Orchestra in London

May 2019

Karen Gomyo simultaneously made her Philharmonia Orchestra and Royal Festival Hall debuts performing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto under the baton of frequent collaborator Jakub Hrůša.

Karen Gomyo makes BBC Symphony Orchestra debut in Dubai

March 2019

BBC Proms Dubai 2019 saw Karen Gomyo perform Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the fast-rising British conductor Ben Gernon.

A “heroic, undaunted performance” in San Francisco Symphony debut

November 2018 - San Francisco Chronicle

A performance of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is nothing to take lightly, either for the performers or the audience. The music digs in deep, across four weighty movements and one of the composer’s trademark massive cadenzas for the soloist, and there are challenges for everyone involved.

In her impressive showing with the San Francisco Symphony on Thursday, Nov. 8 in Davies Symphony Hall, violinist Karen Gomyo didn’t insult our intelligence by making the thing seem easy. On the contrary — she matched the composer step for demanding step, producing a rendition that gleamed with the sweat of honest labor.

Together with guest conductor Jakub Hrusa, Gomyo — a Japanese-born virtuoso who now lives in Berlin — dived into Shostakovich’s showpiece with an obvious respect for both the technical and interpretive difficulties ahead. The combination of craggy rhetoric, capacious formal scale and sheer finger-busting passagework that infuses this concerto means that anyone can go astray at any moment.

Yet, by the time the piece drew to a close nearly 40 minutes later, Gomyo and Hrusa in partnership had conferred an air of triumph on the proceedings. Shostakovich’s expansive lines of thought, which can often seem discursive and even meandering in the wrong hands, emerged here with a welcome sense of formal tautness; the composer’s acrid sensibilities sounded inviting without losing their essential character.

Gomyo’s playing boasts a bold, steely beauty, which at least in this context made few concessions to traditional notions of lyricism or expressive warmth. (Her encore, a lovely account of the fourth of Astor Piazzolla’s “Six Tango Etudes,” offered a more overtly empathetic voice, though even here she made sure to keep the rhythms crisp and muscular.)

In the concerto’s broad opening movement, which the composer labeled “Nocturne,” Gomyo spun out long-breathed melodies with unflinching forthrightness, as if encouraging the listener to revel in the music’s dark, sinewy textures. The bustling scherzo — equally dark, even more corrosive — got a ferocious, precise reading.

But the glory of the performance came in the robust third-movement Passacaglia, which is also the concerto’s center of gravity. In this succession of variations on a theme, Gomyo brought out one character of the music after another, engaging in eloquent counterpoint with other members of the orchestra, delivering the solo part with insight and tact, and finally settling in to give a bravura account of the huge solo cadenza.

Gomyo premieres Adams Chamber Concerto in Chicago

May 2018

Karen Gomyo performed the world premiere of Samuel Adams’ new Chamber Concerto, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen, to great critical acclaim. The work was written for her and commissioned by the CSO to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its MusicNow series.

Review: Chicago Tribune

Review: Chicago Classical Review

Review: Classical Voice America