Kim Puts Emphasis on ‘I’ in Violin : Chamber music: The virtuoso, who plays Sunday in Cerritos, says it’s important that the instrument become ‘part of you.’

Never mind the successes, which have been many. Violinist Young Uck Kim has always harbored doubts about pursuing a music career, and more than once he’s been ready to give up that career.

“Music gives a tremendous amount of pleasure, but it’s also very painful,” said Kim, 48, in a phone interview last week from New York City, where he played at the United Nations. He starts a tour with the Korean Chamber Ensemble on Sunday, its first stop being the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

“It shows your limitations so much,” Kim said. “Think of all these wonderful pieces of music, and you are supposed to express everything there is in them--it’s difficult to be an instrumentalist. You try very hard to become one, the instrument and you. Not attached to you, part of you.”

Most musicians would have no doubts after being handpicked at age 11 by pianist Rudolf Serkin for acceptance to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, or after a nationally televised debut with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra at age 15. Even then, the Seoul-born prodigy figured he’d finish school, then pursue a degree in law or medicine.

With early management less than ideal and his initial recording experience a disappointment, he considered the same a decade later. What carried him through were his friendships and professional associations (usually the same): With Serkin’s son Peter, the pianist with whom he’s performed the complete Mozart and Beethoven violin sonatas, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Emanuel Ax, with whom he formed the Ax-Kim-Ma Trio.

A turnaround began 12 years ago, when he bought a 1716 Stradivarius, called the “Cessole” in honor of its 19th-Century owner and considered among the top handful of violins in the world; he paid more than $500,000 for it.

The “Cessole,” and the expressive subtleties it opened up for Kim compared with the more forthright Guarneri he had been playing, changed his life. Only now, he said, is he learning what it takes to “become one” with his instrument:

“An instrument is like a person: It takes a long time to know them,” Kim said. “You think you know them, then they throw you a little curve. They have a personality of their own. And just like a relationship, you can’t force things; you just have to get to know it.

“Sometimes I feel familiar with it,” he said, “sometimes it feels like a stranger. Sometimes I have to start all over again.”

Since Kim’s purchase of the violin, the Ax-Kim-Ma recording of the Dvorak Trios for Columbia was named Stereo Review’s Record of the Year in 1988. He also has recorded the Mozart and Schumann Piano Quartets with pianist Andre Previn, violist Heiichiro Ohyama and cellist Gary Hoffman for BMG Classics, and the complete Mozart violin concertos with Christoph Eschenbach and the London Philharmonic Orchestra for RPO Records.

And it’s Mozart that Kim turns to in Cerritos, the Concerto in G, K. 216. Conductor Kim Min also leads the Korean Chamber Ensemble in the North American premiere of Byung-Dong Paik’s “Youlmok,” given its first performance by the group in Saga, Japan, in February; Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso No. 12, “La Follia,” and Britten’s “Simple Symphony.”

This two-week tour ends with concerts in New York and Washington, D.C., and follows another tour that combined Western music and dance: Kim, who now lives in Connecticut and Paris and is professor of violin at the Detmold Musik Academie in Germany, collaborated with pianist Staffan Scheja and two principal dancers of the New York City Ballet in a program of Ravel and Stravinsky.

“Usually musicians play in the pit,” Kim noted. “Here there’s a place where the two dancers just stand next to the piano and listen.”

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The project was inspired by a concert with the Ax-Kim-Ma Trio and Kabuki choreographer Bando Tamasaburo for the centennial of Tokyo’s Kabuki Theater.

Top-echelon Asian and Asian-American musicians burst onto the Western music scene today in amazing numbers. Anglo-American parents look on with envy and admiration at the discipline of Asian children when it comes to practice, practice, practice.

Kim wonders about the motivation behind all that practice.

“In Korea, education is a very important aspect of their lives,” he said. “But for some very odd reason, they all take up either piano or violin--like kids in this country become baseball players.

“It’s a curious thing,” Kim said. “It’s not love of music that starts all this. It’s that they think it’s good for the children to have musical interests to round out the education. And I think in some cases children suffer from that.

“Music is a commitment for the rest of your life,” he said. “It has to be something you really love. Even then, it is questionable and difficult. Only if it’s something you love is it worth going through all the difficulties and disappointments.”

* Violinist Young Uck Kim joins the Korean Chamber Ensemble as soloist in Mozart’s Concerto in G, K. 216, Sunday at Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. Kim Min also leads the ensemble in works by Geminiani, Paik and Britten. 2 p.m. $18-$30. (310) 916-8500.