Guest Artist Bio

Karen Gomyo

• Performs in Schumann and Shostakovich:
  Saturday, February 6, 2010
  Sunday, February 7, 2010
  Monday, February 8, 2010
  

Recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2008, Canadian violinist Karen Gomyo first caught public attention just one week after her 15th birthday, when she won the 1997 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. She became the youngest musician ever to be presented in the Young Concert Artists Series, in a critically acclaimed New York debut as recipient of the Summis Auspiciis Prize, and since then she has performed across North and South America, Europe and Asia.

At these concerts, Gomyo returns to the Oregon Symphony for the first time since November 2003. Other highlights this season include re-engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl and the symphonies of St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Montreal and Toronto, among others.
In September 2008 Gomyo had the honor of performing a solo Bach movement at the first Symposium for the Victims of Terrorism at the United Nations in New York.

Born in Tokyo to a Japanese painter and French professor of philosophy, Gomyo was raised in Montreal. At age 5 she had already begun performing in public. She was one of 10 children chosen to play in a master class in Chicago given by Dorothy DeLay and was promptly taken under DeLay’s wing to study on full scholarship at The Juilliard School. Gomyo continued her studies with Mauricio Fuks at Indiana University and with Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she graduated in May 2007 with an Artist Diploma, the school’s highest honor.

Gomyo plays the “ex Foulis” Stradivarius of 1703, which was bought for her exclusive use by a private sponsor.