Junghwa Moon Auer
piano (South Korea)
November 17 at 6 p.m.
A native of Korea, Junghwa Moon Auer began her piano study at the age of six. She attended the prestigious Yewon Middle School and Seoul Music and Art High School where she was recognized as one of their most gifted students.
After graduating from Yeonsei University in Korea, Ms. Moon came to the United States in 1993 to study at the New England Conservatory, where she obtained her MM degree. She attended the Aspen Music Festival four summers, as well as summer programs in Chautauqua, Luzern, and Prague. At the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati she pursued her DMA, meanwhile winning CCM’s concerto competition, a live radio broadcast on WGUC in Cincinnati, and in Italy won a prize in the Ibla International Competition. During this time she was also invited back to Korea to play in the Kumho Recital Series.
In 2001 Ms. Moon returned home, where she performed frequently in Seoul, Busan and Gwangju and taught in several institutions, including Seoul National University. During this time she performed Beethoven’s Emperor concerto with the Janácek Orchestra in the Czech Republic, the Chopin E minor with the Zilina Orchestra in Slovakia and Mozart K. 467 with the Cairo Symphony, the first Korean pianist ever to play in Egypt.
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Having attended the Prague Keyboard Institute as a student a few years before, she returned there in 2011 & 2012 as a faculty member. A couple of years later she helped New York’s Young Concert Artists to hold regional Asian auditions in Seoul, and served on their preliminary Jury.
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When Ms. Moon came to live in Bloomington in 2006, the Edward Auer Chopin Class had existed for some time as a small annual event. She saw its potential, and, as Coordinator, built it year by year, step by step, into what we have today. Her first innovation was expanding the Workshop’s purview ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Junghwa Moon Auer from Chopin to all repertoire. Vigorous recruitment soon brought more and more students from other countries. Outreach concerts as nearby as Meadowood and as far as New York City’s Steinway Hall successfully raised the profile of the Workshop. A solo competition was introduced, with great success. In 2014 the workshop took a gamble on one of Junghwa’s dreams for the Workshop: a concerto competition, with chances for two participants to play a whole concerto with orchestra. In 2015 for the first time at JSoM the entire Workshop streamed and saved in archives, enabling remote participation and incrementally increasing the Workshop’s geographical reach.
Junghwa Moon and her husband Edward Auer have been performing as a duo for the last 10 years in many cities in the US, Canada, Hong Kong and Korea. From 2017 she joined as an artist faculty member at Roosevelt University.