Biography (read more)
Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul on 14 July 1961 and taught herself the piano from an early age. She studied composition with Sukhi Kang at Seoul National University, won several international prizes in her early twenties, and in 1985 took the Gaudeamus prize in Amsterdam with Spektra for three cellos, written as her graduation piece. An academic grant took her to Germany the same year, and she studied with György Ligeti at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg from 1985 to 1988. She has been based in Berlin since, working from 1988 as a freelance composer at the electronic music studio of the Technische Universität Berlin, where she produced seven works beginning with Gradus ad Infinitum in 1989.
Die Troerinnen, for women’s voices, was premiered by the Bergen Philharmonic in 1990, and Acrostic Wordplay, given by the Nieuw Ensemble in 1991, was her breakthrough — it has since been played in more than twenty countries. Her work with the Ensemble Intercontemporain began with Fantaisie mécanique in 1994 and brought several commissions; Boosey & Hawkes have published her exclusively since 1995, and Kent Nagano, with whom she has worked since 1999, has premiered six of her scores. The First Violin Concerto, premiered by Viviane Hagner in 2002, won the Grawemeyer Award in 2004; Gougalōn took the Prince Pierre Foundation’s composition prize in 2010, and she received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2024. Guardian writers placed her 2009 Cello Concerto eleventh among art music written since 2000, Andrew Clements calling it the most original and entertainingly disconcerting of her concertos. Her second opera, Die dunkle Seite des Mondes, to her own libretto, was premiered at the Hamburg State Opera on 18 May 2025 under Nagano.
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