Kangmin Justin Kim on Kimchilia Bartoli

Most of you will know me as a countertenor regularly performing with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Andrea Marcon, and Václav Luks in operas by Monteverdi, Händel, Mozart on stages across the globe from the Royal Opera House to Glyndebourne Festival. But ever since I studied in London at the Royal Academy of Music a decade ago, I have had a secret desire to bring my drag alter-ego Kimchilia Bartoli to the Vauxhall Tavern stage. So, when pianist Fiachra Garvey (a former MA student at the RAM at the same time as me) phoned up to say that he had started Classical Vauxhall Festival in London, I couldn’t wait to devise a show-stopper programme especially for the festival with everything from Vivaldi’s raging aria Agitata da due venti, and Bizet’s Habanera aria from Carmen to Evita and Les Misérables.

Vauxhall enjoys a fabulously colourful past as a den of iniquity: the great and the good would come to enjoy the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens founded by the visionary entrepreneur and impresario Jonathan Tyers in the 1730s. You could watch circus acts or Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks (one rehearsal caused gridlock on the streets of London as an audience of 12,000 headed for the gardens), and brush shoulders with royalty. You might even see Princess Seraphina - the infamous John Cooper flamboyantly flaunting a pretty, frilly dress to dance in a masquerade in the gardens in 1732. Princess Seraphina caused a huge scandal, and Kimchilia Bartoli follows in her footsteps.

So, who is Kimchilia? On my first day as a student at Northwestern, my singing teacher asked me where I saw myself when I graduate in 4 years’ time. As a flippant joke, I said I wanted to be singing Agitata da due venti, like Cecilia Bartoli on her Vivaldi album. It raised an eyebrow, as at that point I was a tenor. In second year, we had to take a course in comedy in music theatre, exploring slapstick, impersonation, and mimicry. As we didn’t have many opportunities to try it out our new skills, I tried out some experiments on YouTube, writing, filming and editing these comic videos. I learnt what not to do the hard way, from the harshest commentators, but before I knew it, I had amassed millions of views.

Fast forward to my graduation from Northwestern, and I suddenly had an idea of how to meld my two worlds of comedy and opera singing together – La Kimchilia! I got the outfit from a thrift-store in Boystown, Chicago, performed as Kimchilia in a special recital-hour class called ‘All Fached Up’, and posted the video, filmed by my roommate, on my YouTube channel. Before I knew it, the video was being shared on Facebook by famous singers with comments by Andreas Scholl, Vivica Genaux, and many other greats of the baroque opera world. Kimchilia had already made her mark in the classical music world not even a month after her birth!

After numerous rejections from Young Artist Programmes across the globe, I became apprehensive that this piece of frivolity could perhaps damage my future career as a serious singer (one director even told me that he wouldn’t ever hire me until everybody in the world forgot about the video, and that he himself would never forget). But inadvertently it helped me to secure a trouser role in a Cavalli opera called Elena at Aix-en-Provence Festival, taking the part of Menelao, disguised as a female wrestling instructor so as to sneak into Elena’s chamber. It propelled my career into more gigs. When I finally got to meet Cecilia Bartoli in person, she embraced me declaring ‘O mia sorella’ (oh my sister).

These days, Kimchilia has a life of her own, understudying the life of her big sister Cecilia full-time, but it was too irresistible to not give her the limelight at Fiachra’s festival.

She will be wearing a gorgeous upcycled-sari dress by Jennifer Garside (@wytephantom on Instagram, Facebook and Etsy) to feed your opera diva fantasy. Think 90’s underground ball à la Paris is Burning, and Kimchilia will walk in not only one, nor two, but three categories in one night! I am so excited to accompany her and be back in London again between performances of Alcina in Brno.

You can find out more about Classical Vauxhall Festival here.