Prague Offspring: Unsuk Chin in Conversation

“My music is a reflection of my dreams,” says the Composer-in-Residence of Prague Offspring 2026 Unsuk Chin (*1961). “I try to render into music the visions of immense light and visions of an incredible magnificence of colours that I see in all my dreams, a play of light and colours floating through the room and at the same time forming a fluid sound sculpture. Its beauty is very abstract and remote, but it is for these very qualities that it addresses the emotions and can communicate joy and warmth.”

The native of Seoul in South Korea, for whom the connection between the cultures of the East and West is a decisive element in her work, studied in Hamburg with Gÿorgy Ligeti and she currently lives in Berlin. For her compositions she has received the highest honours any living composer could achieve. Her Violin Concerto No. 1 garnered the 2004 Grawemeyer Award, which is considered to be the Nobel Prize in music. This was followed by the Arnold Schoenberg Prize and in 2024 the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto, commissioned by the BBC Proms and premiered at the festival in 2010 and subsequently released by Deutsche Grammophon, was hailed by critics of Britain’s The Guardian as the twelfth best composition of the 21^st century. Chin’s music is performed and commissioned by the world’s finest orchestras and opera houses: The Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics and the Bavarian State Opera. Conductor Kent Nagano is a great admirer and promoter of her music, while Unsuk Chin’s works are also readily presented by other world conductors, such as Sir Simon Rattle, Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Since its premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007, her opera Alice in Wonderland, based on Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel, has seen new productions in London, St. Louis and Los Angeles, and this season it will receive its Austrian premiere at the Theater an der Wien. Advice from a Caterpillar is an instrumental interlude from this opera, during which the Caterpillar’s advice is given not in words, but via the sound of the bass clarinet.