Yumi Hwang-Williams started playing new music quite casually, back when she was a violin student at the Curtis Institute. At the time, the school didn’t have a big composition program, and getting new scores performed was pretty informal. “The composers were there, you’d make friends, and they’d ask you as a favor to learn a piece for a class or concert,” recalls Hwang-Williams.

Not exactly high-profile premieres back then.

Today, in contrast, the violinist spends a great deal of her time playing freshly inked scores by such leading composers as Christopher Rouse, Michael Daugherty, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Thomas Adès. Most of these opportunities come to her via her work as concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and the Cabrillo Music Festival, in both cases under conductor Marin Alsop.

“She’s obviously someone I think very, very highly of,” says Alsop, who moved this year to the Baltimore Symphony. “For a violinist of her caliber in this stage of her career, if you have the talent it’s a wonderful way to make a statement by championing these new works rather than yet again playing the Mendelssohn concerto. Why bother with that? She can bring something unique and new to all these new pieces. She’s an extremely conscientious musician. She likes to delve deeply into the music, and she’s become close with the composers whose works she’s performed.”

Those composers are some of her biggest fans. Rouse has called her 2003 performance of his Violin Concerto at the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Contemporary Music Festival “the definitive version.” Says Rouse, “Yumi is enormously dedicated and enthusiastic in preparing new repertoire as well as being a joy to work with. She was the first—and to date the only—soloist to play one of my concerti from memory, and I was very touched by this. She’s also, of course, a fabulous violinist.”

Hwang-Williams says of performing the Rouse concerto from memory, “It was a bit of a dare, actually. He was sort of cheeky about it. He would say, ‘Although my concertos are performed all over the world, no one has ever memorized them. Maybe someday …’ He totally egged me on, and I took the bait.”

She got into the habit of snatching at the bait and, indeed, whatever opportunities arose back in her Curtis days, when she was a talented, but rather aimless student.

“My students these days have more of a plan of action than I did,” says Hwang-Williams, who also teaches at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. “For me, the violin was a gift that landed in front of me, and I took to it, even though I started it late, when I was 10 years old, right after my family emigrated from South Korea. But I took to it and made pretty quick progress, and I was accepted at Curtis when I was 15. It was a lot of divine providence that I became a violinist.

“In Korea, my mother dreamed of her little daughter playing the violin, but at the time it was not economically possible. Then, after we moved to Philadelphia, which has such great musical heritage, I was accepted into a music program based on my singing. As luck would have it, there was a Korean violin teacher who started me on the instrument. I found a teacher whose name is also Yumi, Yumi Ninomiya-Scott. She teaches at Curtis and plays in the Philadelphia Orchestra, and I started studying with her. Through her, I met Jascha Brodsky. He nurtured me and got me into Curtis.

“At Curtis I met all these fabulous players and talented musicians, and I felt so behind. I hadn’t had that much performing experience, and my repertoire was pretty small. I had colleagues in school who basically already had a career. I didn’t think much about what I would do as a professional. I was more of a sponge, trying to learn as much as I could. I had no practical goal. Now I wish that I had had more guidance and drive, but all I was really concerned about was improving my playing and musicianship.

“The reason I got into the orchestral world was just financial. I started getting good gigs and playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and it paid the rent and I could be an adult—and I loved playing this repertoire. I did not have the ego issues of a lot of violin students, who think, ‘I’m only going to be a soloist,’ or ‘I’m only going to play chamber music.’ I settled into an orchestral career, and out of that I’ve been able to really continue my growth and challenge myself to learn and perform new repertoire.”

Hwang-Williams has proved to have good taste in new music, but her success with fresh scores, she says, has less to do with taste than with refusing to make snap judgments. “Often you have colleagues who say, ‘Oh, that piece is crap.’ They’re so quick to judge. You have to get to know a piece, hear it in concert, play it, give it its due before it comes alive.”

Which is not to say that she’s necessarily slow to appreciate a piece. “When I became concertmaster of the Cabrillo Music Festival,” she recalls, “Marin Alsop asked me to listen to Aaron Jay Kernis’ Lament and Prayer. It was a tape I was listening to in the car, and I had to pull over because I was so bowled over by the piece. She asked me if I wanted to play it, and I said, ‘Absolutely!’”

Hwang-Williams credits Alsop and the Cabrillo Music Festival for plunging her into the world of new violin concertos, and for introducing her to works she has since played around the country. “I’ve been really fortunate to play pieces I believe in, and to have had a venue for it,” she says.

It’s rarely an easy job. “My most recent hurdle,” she says, “was playing Yun Isang’s first violin concerto, written in 1981, with the Basel Symphony and Dennis Russell Davies. It’s a piece I believe had only been performed twice. It’s a mammoth work, almost 40 minutes long, an incredibly challenging experience. Technically, it pushed me in ways I never thought about going. It’s almost a different vocabulary, and it took a great deal of patience to learn a piece of that difficulty.”

Yet Hwang-Williams doesn’t feel that she becomes enslaved to new music’s technical demands.

“Playing a new concer to gives me a sense of freedom that’s really liberating,” she says. “You don’t have 20 interpretations by great previous and current violinists that you have to sort through.

“In Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, we’re taught these interpretations and past traditions so carefully by our teachers. They’re so ingrained in our musical bones. It’s completely different with new music. For learning these pieces, I did have a couple of recordings to go off of, but it’s much easier to come up with your own ideas after hearing just one performance than after years of indoctrination in the Brahms traditions.

“I love that aspect of playing new music.

“I’ve been really fortunate to play with the great composers of our time, and I think there’s really been a renaissance in the last 10–15 years. Now new music is accessible, approachable, and relevant. The dark days of new music are over. Composers are writing music that speaks to the heart and makes a point, and I think that’s what we want from any art form.”

Even so, contemporary music has a reputation for technical difficulty. Hwang-Williams says that’s true to a degree, but shouldn’t be exaggerated. “Playing the Brahms concerto well is a feat, too,” she says. “But there are different challenges to playing new music well. Certainly technical—they’re stretching the limitations of the instrument. Now, you hear a Paganini concerto or Lalo, and it sounds difficult and requires such brilliant playing, with all that passagework. But it can be played beautifully and quickly because it falls into scale patterns and lays on the instrument well. The biggest challenge of playing new pieces is that these composers are not bound by writing for the violin as much. For instance, my latest project is the Adès violin concerto, and he’s a percussionist, so the rhythmic complexities of this piece are something I’ve not come across before.

“Luckily I’ve played several of his orchestral pieces and feel somewhat familiar with his language, but the cross rhythms and polyrhythms and mixed meters are quite a challenge. I’m getting nervous just talking about it.”

Nervous or not, Hwang-Williams keeps her cool in concert, according to conductor Alsop. “She’s not prone to histrionics,” she says. “I think she’s a very charismatic, but authentic, interpreter. The music leads the way, not the fact that she’s the soloist. She’s a joy to work with, very collaborative, very receptive, very thoughtful, always very prepared. It’s always a challenge for anyone who steps out of the orchestra to solo: suddenly you have to play to the large hall and project in a magnified capacity, but Yumi has no problem doing that.”

Says the violinist, “It’s different within the orchestra. The sheer athleticism and confidence and bravado you have to have as a soloist to pull off a piece is different from playing section or even concertmaster, because in the orchestra you are one of many. Although you’re leading and helping interpret the conductor’s direction, you’re a team player.

“As a soloist, every note you play has to be heard and executed beautifully. In the orchestra, the palette is much wider. Often you have to play like a whisper, which could never be heard as a soloist.

“But the language of the music is still the same, either way, and I’m glad I started my career not as a soloist, but learning my music through playing this great repertoire in the orchestra.”