Myung-wha Chung
Korean musician
Myung-wha Chung (Korean: 정명화; born 19 March 1944) is a South Korean cellist.
Biography
Myung-wha Chung was born in 1944 in Seoul, Japanese Korea (today South Korea), to a musical family. Her younger sister is the violinist Kyung-wha Chung, and her younger brother is the pianist/conductor Myung-whun Chung.
She finished her high school studies at the Seoul Arts High School, and made her debut with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, before continuing her studies in the USA.
She was a pupil of Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School in New York City between 1961 and 1965. Following that, she then studied with Gregor Piatigorsky at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles between 1965 and 1968.
She made her U.S. concert debut in San Francisco in 1969, and her European debut at Spoleto, Italy, in 1969. In that same year, she also had the honor of performing at the White House.
In 1971, she won the Geneva International Music Competition (cello division).
Besides her international concert career as a soloist, playing with the world's leading conductors and orchestras, she also plays chamber music partnering her siblings as the Chung Trio.
Her cello is the 1731 "Braga" Stradivarius.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q626491. VIAF identifies the subject as 49407571. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1961, 1965 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Myung-wha Chung” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.