The acclaimed 14th InClassica International Music Festival, organised by SAMIT Event Group, returns to Dubai on Sunday, 6th April 2025, opening with a spectacular performance at Dubai Opera by Roman Kim, winner of the International Violin Competition "Valsesia Musica" in 2012. For this special evening, Kim will join forces with the distinguished Franz Schubert Filharmonia under the baton of celebrated British conductor John Warner, Founder and Artistic Director of Orchestra for the Earth and Music Director of Oxford Opera, offering audiences an extraordinary display of technical brilliance and musical innovation. The concert will open with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Overture to The Magic Flute, KV 620, themed around the idea of love, which premiered in 1791 and has remained popular ever since. The programme will then move on to Composer-in-Residence Alexey Shor's Violin Concerto No. 2 ''Phantasms'', a 2018 work emphasising flowing melodies and traditional themes. The evening ends with Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, a large-scale composition that remains one of his most celebrated works.
Highlights of 2024/25 include John's debuts with the Athens State Orchestra and Franz Schubert Filharmonia, a return to the Berliner Symphoniker at the Philharmonie in Berlin, a new production of Puccini's Tosca with Oxford Opera and concerts with his own Orchestra for the Earth. The past season saw debuts with the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Slovak State Philharmonic, Berliner Symphonieker and Armenian Symphony Orchestra, and in previous seasons he has also conducted orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic and worked with soloists such as Thomas Hampson, James Ehnes, Wu Wei and Camille Thomas.
2024/25 will be his fourth season as Music Director of Oxford Opera, with whom he has conducted several productions including most recently La Traviata and Die Zauberflöte. He has also conducted at Glyndebourne, Palau de les Arts Valencia and Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in repertoire ranging from Janáček to Puccini to Mozart. As a frequent guest conductor with Spectra Ensemble he has put a special emphasis on underperformed operas by women composers, leading critically acclaimed productions of works by Ethel Smyth and Amy Beach.
Read MoreHis pioneering work with Orchestra for the Earth, which he founded in 2017, takes him around Europe with a wide variety of concerts that bring together music and nature, collaborating with leading artists, scientists and charities to raise awareness about the climate and environmental crises.
A committed advocate of contemporary music, John has been invited to commission and conduct world premieres at the Philharmonie Luxembourg, Het Concertgebouw and, most recently, a week-long residency at the Beijing Music Festival which included four world premieres and five Chinese premieres of contemporary classics by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Huang Ruo, Sir George Benjamin and Messiaen.
John honed his craft as assistant to many of the world’s leading conductors, such as Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Karina Canellakis, Robin Ticciati and Edward Gardner, working with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, London Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Dresden Staatskapelle, Wiener Symphoniker, Les Siècles and others.
He studied music at the University of Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours in 2016 and an MSt with Distinction in 2017. He also writes on music, with frequent publications in the Wagner Journal and an upcoming book published by Routledge. He is a regular guest lecturer at the Curtis Institute and Johns Hopkins University in the US.
Roman Kim is internationally acknowledged as one of the most innovative violinists of our time. He has been constantly contributing to the evolution of violin playing technique, expanding the boundaries of what – some years ago – had been considered impossible by even the best violinists in the world.
When, in 2010, he published a video on YouTube, performing his transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach's Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3, the then 19-year-old caused a sensation. The fact that he was playing all four parts of the score on a single violin amazed experts and famous violinists. Ever since, his fresh and unconventional approach to classical music has been applauded by audiences all over the world.
Read MoreAfter winning the International Violin Competition "Valsesia Musica" (2012), Kim played concerts in Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, Russia, USA, China, South Korea, Romania, Switzerland and Taiwan. Among others, he appeared in auditoriums such as the Laeiszhalle Hamburg, the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, the Cologne Philharmonic, the Romanian Athenaeum, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Munich Herkulessaal, the Beijing Concert Hall, the Bari Teatro Petruzzelli, the Seoul Arts Centre, the Franz List Music Academy Budapest and the Taipei National Concert Hall. He performed with orchestras like the NDR Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Halle, the Aachen Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra del Teatro Petruzzelli, the Suwon Philharmonic Orchestra and the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, under the baton of distinguished conductors such as Aziz Shokhakimov, Dirk Kaftan, Josep Caballé Domenech, Daejin Kim, Alexandre Bloch and Alpesh Chauhan.
Composing soloist inspired by the past
As a soloist, Roman Kim is especially devoted to the works of Niccolò Paganini, fighting against the prejudice of Paganini's compositions being merely superficial virtuoso show pieces. Resuming the great and old tradition of composing soloists, Roman Kim is also a performer of his own compositions. In 2015, he started a close collaboration with the renowned German music publisher "Bärenreiter". The first edition of Kim's arrangement of Bach's Air was sold out within a few months. Roman Kim's music is romantic, tonal and melodic. While it reminds of the the great composers of the 19th century, his music is also highly original, due to his technical innovations that allow him to create absolutely astonishing sounds. Roman Kim's paraphrases "I Brindisi" on themes by Italian opera composer Verdi strengthened his reputation as a modern Paganini. Inspired by Arcangelo Corelli's “La Folia”, Kim proposed his own approach to the famous musical theme that inspired so many composers of the past.
Combining musical brilliance and spiritual depth
In April 2017, Roman Kim's "Three Romances" for violin and piano were published by "Bärenreiter". The same year, his debut album “Kimpossible” was released by Sony Classical and
received with enthusiasm by critiques around the globe. One of Kim's latest works is an arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach's Piano Concerto in d-Minor. It does not only translate Bach's orchestral music to the solo violin, but also disposes of a cadenza that Kim composed for this version. In 2019, Roman Kim published his arrangement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's “Eine kleine Nachtmusik”. During the last two years, Roman Kim worked on his “Requiem”. The expressive large scale composition for solo violin was inspired by Gregorian chants and the Roman Catholic Mass for the dead. The movements follow the traditional liturgical form, combining musical brilliance and spiritual depth. The “Requiem” should have been inaugurated in Hiroshima, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city. However, the event had to be postponed due to the 2020 pandemic.
Pupil of Galina Turchaninova
Born in Kazakhstan into a family of Korean-Tatar-Belarussian descent, Kim started to play the violin at the age of five. Only three years later, he went to Moscow to attend the class of Galina Turchaninova who, as a professor at the Moscow Central Music School, taught many famous violinist like Maxim Vengerov. In 2008, Roman Kim was accepted, aged 16, at the
Musikhochschule Cologne, where he studied with Prof. Viktor Tretyakov. Roman Kim currently lives in Cologne and studies composition at the local conservatory. He plays a violin he designed himself. The instrument was created in 2015 at the workshop of master violin maker Alexander Hazin (Cologne) and named „Superior".
The Franz Schubert Filharmonia has enjoyed a great reception from the audience since its inception, both for its artistic quality and for the relevance of its programmes.
Formed by a new generation of the best musicians in the country who perform under the inspired direction of Tomàs Grau, Music Director and Founder, the orchestra has collaborated with such soloists as Anne-Sophie Mutter, Maria João Pires, Joshua Bell, Mischa Maisky, Midori, Ivo Pogorelich, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Rudolf Buchbinder, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Stephen Kovacevich, Gautier Capuçon, Sabine Meyer, Steven Isserlis, Paul Lewis, Alexei Volodin, Roberto Alagna, Mark Padmore, Seong-Jin Cho, Alice Sara Ott, Javier Perianes, Ainhoa Arteta, Asier Polo, Leticia Moreno, Pablo Ferrández, Judith Jáuregui and Iván Martín.
The Franz Schubert Filharmonia has also worked with such conductors as Josep Pons, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Antoni Ros Marbà, Gábor Takács-Nagy, Salvador Mas, Pablo González, Edmon Colomer, Paul Agnew, Guillermo García Calvo, Thomas Rösner, Virginia Martínez, Jordi Mora, Josep Caballé Domenech, Marzio Conti and Salvador Brotons, among others.
Read MoreThe orchestra has performed in such venues as the Carnegie Hall in New York, Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid, Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, Gran Teatre del Liceu, L’Auditori de Barcelona, Auditorio de Zaragoza, Palacio Euskalduna in Bilbao and Palau de les Arts in Valencia, and has made concert tours in the United States, Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
The Franz Schubert Filharmonia performs its subscription seasons in Barcelona, Tarragona and Lleida, and since 2009 has had the honour of being the resident orchestra of El Vendrell, the birthplace of the maestro Pablo Casals.
The orchestra has recorded several albums, among which we can highlight Alba Eterna, an opera by the composer Albert Guinovart and produced by the Sony Classical label, and Die Romantische Seele with the pianist Judith Jáuregui, produced by the label ARS Produktion, winner of the International Classical Music Awards, and nominated for the Opus Klassik Awards.
