Associate Conductor
Jungho Kim, Associate Conductor
The Sioux City Symphony Orchestra's Associate Conductor and Education Director Jungho Kim has played a major role in Sioux City's musical scene in both ends of the primary achievements of this 90 years-old organization, performing at the highest level for the current concert goers and exploring and developing new audiences through various educational concerts/programs. After coming to Sioux City in 2005, Jungho Kim has been assigned to every type of concert imaginable - Family concerts, Pops concerts, Educational concerts and Classical programs.
Mr. Kim's Classical concert programs included a full production of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Artunian's Trumpet Concerto with Phil Smith (principal trumpet, New York Philharmonic) as soloist, Symphonies and orchestral works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Gershwin, Copland, Stravinsky, among many others. His contemporary repertoire includes challenging programs by dazzling composers of our generation such as Huang Ruo and Raimundo Penaforte. Jungho Kim has also been conducting the final round of the Iowa International Piano Competition where dozens of extremely talented pianists from world over compete and play concerti by Beethoven and Mozart as a part of the Orchestra's subscription concert.
On the other hand, Mr. Kim has been actively reaching out to new audiences to make orchestral music more available to young students around the area through various types of concerts. He has worked with the puppet company Das Puppenspiel on Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf to introduce classical music and the orchestra interestingly and effectively to the younger generation. More recently, as a part of the Sioux City Symphony Orchestra's educational program, he conducted concerts for more than 5,000 public/private schools' 6th grade students in the area and due to the success and enthused school teachers' demand, the orchestra is now producing another school educational concert for the 4th graders in the area where more than 2,000 students have attended. The program included works such as the Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saens and the Pulcinella Suite by Stravinsky for which he created "study-guides" for the general music teachers in the schools to have the listeners prepared for a more effective concert experience. These concerts were in collaboration with the school's music curriculum and also had video DVD presentations of students' related art works during the concerts.
Jungho Kim's musical training began at an early age on the piano and violin. He received a Master of Music degree from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati in violin performance and went on to earn another Master's degree in orchestral conducting at the same school under the guidance of Maestro Mark Gibson and Xian Zhang. During his graduate studies at the Conservatory, a string orchestra Queen City Virtuosi was formed by the graduate students from world-over for him to conduct a wide range of classical repertoire and worked with guest soloists such as Dr. Piotr Milewski and Dr. Anna Vayman.
He was a selected participant of the Kurt Mazur Conducting Seminar held by the Manhattan School of Music in New York, and the Conductor's Retreat at Medomak under the tutoring of Maestro Kenneth Kiesler. He also worked with Yu Feng, the head conductor of the Beijing Conservatory in China.
Jungho Kim now lives in Sioux City, Iowa with his violinist wife Eunho and two sons, Teo and Juno.
