An Evening With the Three B’s and Top Thai Music Students

Pianist Thaya Kongpakpaisarn (left) and violinist Yadaq Lee (right)

Bangkok, Thailand. August 26, 2010. Because big name soloists seldom perform in Bangkok, I attend a lot of student performances, and performances of both Thai and foreign teachers and professionals who have not made it into the international arena. Last night at the Goethe-Institut’s auditorium, in a violin and piano recital titled “The three B’s,” I again experienced how pleasant and rewarding an evening of well-played music can be.

Violinist Yada Lee and pianist Thaya Kongpakpaisarn are conservatory performance students now studying at top schools in the US, Yada at Oberlin Conservatory, and Thaya at the Eastman School. Before going abroad to study, both won local and regional competitions. In fact, two years ago, I attended the Chopin Competition in Bangkok, in which Thaya was the top prize winner.

Thaya and Yada are very talented, accomplished and musical, and they chose a program in which they exhibited just how well they can play. Yada began the evening with Bach’s Sonata No. 1 for solo violin, after which she was joined by Thaya for Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 5 (“Spring”.) After the intermission, they performed Brahms’s gorgeous Violin Sonata No. 3. Suffice it to say that their fluid, beautiful music-making put me in a good mood, which totally erased the experience of the hour-long traffic jam getting to the concert late, and that the euphoric afterglow continues.