There are doctors who spend their free time playing golf, doctors who collect watches and doctors who do nothing but doctoring. Then there is Dr. Pongpun Sirinapapun, known to most people simply as Dr. Kim, who spends his evenings conducting orchestras.
It is an unusual hobby, although calling it a hobby seems increasingly inaccurate.
Dr. Kim is a doctor at Rajavej Hospital Chiang Mai who also has his own successful aesthetics clinic which he attends to most evenings. He is also a violinist, pianist, conductor, music organiser, sometime concert promoter and judging by the number of musicians he has been gathering around him, an aspiring orchestra builder. Along with his university friend Nagornpong Aroonrattanataewan, or Putter, he founded the Chiang Mai Serenade String Orchestra with a fairly straightforward ambition: to give professional and amateur musicians somewhere to play and Chiang Mai audiences somewhere to listen.
The slight problem is that Chiang Mai has never been particularly well supplied with either.
“I realised that Chiang Mai is multicultural, there are so many people here from all over the world with so many interests…I believe that what we need is more classical music. Surely there are many people who love it as I do.”
There used to be more of it. Payap University had a thriving musical scene, as did the Chiang Mai Philharmonic Orchestra and AUA. For a while, classical music was even rather fashionable. Dr. Kim remembers the Thai film Season Change, released in 2006, about young people pursuing music against the wishes of their parents, creating a small wave of enthusiasm for classical instruments among Thai children.
Eventually sponsorship declined, audiences became harder to find and musicians did what musicians tend to do when there is no work: they left for Bangkok and beyond.
And this, really, is what Dr. Kim is trying to change.
Dr. Kim wants Chiang Mai to have its own orchestra, or eventually one or two full orchestras, performing regularly enough that classical music becomes part of the city’s cultural life rather than an occasional event requiring a flight to the Big Mango.
“It is a start,” he says.
The secret violin
Dr. Kim’s love affair with classical music began long before he became a doctor.
He grew up in Chiang Mai and attended Montfort College, where he was surrounded by a strong musical tradition. Coming from a concervative Chinese family, his father was not particularly keen on the idea of his son becoming a musician, so Dr. Kim did what many children with disapproving parents have done throughout history: he did it secretly.
He wanted a violin badly enough that his parents eventually agreed on one condition — he had to maintain a 4.0 grade average.
So he studied.
He took violin lessons at Payap University on weekends and later learned piano as well. At Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Medicine he founded the MED CMU Chorus, which has now been performing for more than a decade, often with an orchestra accompanying the singers.
His friend Putter, now by his side in this musical journey, followed a rather different route.
Originally from Lampang, he started playing wind instruments in his school band before encountering strings at a visiting concert from Bangkok. At around fifteen, he picked up the violin and began studying for the ABRSM examinations. When he went to Maejo University to study mechanical engineering, his parents were no more enthusiastic about a musical career than Dr. Kim’s had been.
So the two friends played together instead.
“It is my passion,” Dr. Kim said simply. Had I been given a chance, classical music would have been my career.
Putter eventually taught himself double bass so that he could join an orchestra, then spent three years repairing instruments for the Royal Thai Air Force Music Division. Today he runs JAESOL, repairing everything from violins and cellos to pianos and double basses. In 2024 he became part of an Asian piano technician programme, travelling to countries including Korea, the United States and Singapore to work on instruments.
Neither man followed the conventional path into music and perhaps that is why they are so determined to help pave a path for other people.
Building an orchestra in Chiang Mai
The first orchestra Dr. Kim put together was actually for a charity concert before Covid. A friend wanted to raise money for medical equipment for hospitals in remote areas, so they gathered professional musicians, students and enthusiastic amateurs and assembled a roughly 30-piece orchestra at Khum Phucome.
Then Covid arrived and everything stopped.
The Chiang Mai Serenade String Orchestra has now been developing for around five years, initially experimenting with more popular music to make orchestral performances less intimidating. This year, however, Dr. Kim has decided to make a much bigger push.
From September through February, there will be six concerts.
The first, The Little Swan, takes place on September 19th at Cross Chiang Mai Riverside. It is a smaller evening built around cello and strings, featuring Bach’s complete Cello Suite No. 1, Paganini’s Variations on a Single String, Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile, Saint-Saëns’ The Swan, and themes from Romeo and Juliet and Somewhere in Time.
The concert features Guntiga, a Chiang Mai-born cellist who has performed with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra and has now returned home. One of Dr. Kim’s aims is to bring musicians back to Chiang Mai rather than continually losing them to Bangkok.
There is another little swan involved, too.
A young cellist supported by the Mae Suay Foundation will be part of the evening. The foundation works with disadvantaged children, using music as part of their education, and Dr. Kim hopes the concert will help raise support for her future.
The ticket sales are intended to cover the costs of putting on the concert. This is not, at least for now, a money-making enterprise.
“We are not professionals,”Dr. Kim says. “We are trying to start building a community.”
On October 24th, the orchestra moves to the Shangri-La Chiang Mai for The Concerto Concert, featuring more than 20 string musicians and a series of works in which an individual instrument takes centre stage. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 and movements from Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 21 and 12 are on the programme, among others.
The idea is also to introduce audiences to the word concerto without making them feel they have wandered into an examination hall.
Dr. Kim spends considerable time writing the scripts for his concerts, explaining pieces and composers along the way.
“I want people to slowly understand and get to know it,” he says.
Classical music can be an intimidating proposition if your only previous experience has been being told at school to sit quietly while someone explains something about Beethoven. A concert should, perhaps, do more than present two hours of music, it should inspire curiosity and feelings and a thirst for more, he explained.
Dr. Kim wants people to know what they are hearing and he is passionate about sharing how he fell in love with classical music and what it has meant to him.
Enter Mozart
Then comes The Mozart Chronicles, a four-concert series tracing Mozart’s life through his music.
The Little Mozart on November 20th begins with the prodigy: the child who started composing at five.
Mozart’s Vienna, on December 19th, moves into the young Mozart, performing in salons and the increasingly commercial musical world of his time.
The Masterpieces, on January 30th, explores some of the more demanding works of his mature period.
And finally, The Farewell, on February 13th, brings the series towards the end of his extraordinarily short life.
“There is a certain cheekiness in choosing Mozart for a campaign to make classical music accessible, as he is probably already hiding in most people’s subconscious,” smiles Dr. Kim.
“The tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ and the musical alphabet—a, b, c, d—are based on Motzart’s twelve variation composition, which was based on an old French folk song. It all ties in and is so familiar to all of us,” he added.
Dr. Kim also thinks Mozart is a good place for classical novices to start because the music is immediately listenable.
“He was the OG,” he grinned.
It is difficult to argue. But putting on Mozart is the easy part. Putting on Mozart properly in Chiang Mai is another matter.
The practical business of making music
An orchestra requires musicians. Musicians require instruments. Instruments require maintenance. Music requires rehearsal space. Concerts require venues. Venues require money. In fact, it all requires money; a lot of it.
And then there are the instruments that are not quite so easy to find.
For some Mozart programmes, Dr. Kim needs bassoons. Not something easily available in Chiang Mai.
This is the unglamorous side of building a classical music scene, and probably the side audiences rarely consider while sitting in their seats waiting for the conductor to raise his baton.
Dr. Kim, however, has become increasingly interested in the business and management side of music precisely because he knows that passion alone is not enough.
Many years ago, he told Citylife, he once tried to open a café in a hospital while he was a young doctor. It promptly went bankrupt.
Rather than deciding that he was simply terrible at business and retreating permanently to medicine, he took the rather more useful lesson that doctors do not, in fact, know everything. And that has been his mantra ever since.
He began learning about marketing and management and now those skills are being applied to orchestral music.
“The quality of the music is important,” he says. “But management and marketing are important too.”
He wants musicians to be paid. He wants audiences to come. He wants concerts to sell. He wants the orchestra to be sustainable.
This is where the doctor becomes surprisingly practical.
A conductor in a white coat
Dr. Kim is not simply standing at the front waving a stick because he has always fancied being a conductor.
He has studied conducting with Jonathan Mann, a British conductor, and speaks about it with the seriousness of someone who understands how difficult it is.
A conductor does not merely keep everyone together. There is interpretation involved: knowing when something should be sad, jubilant, restrained or powerful, and somehow communicating that interpretation to a room full of musicians who are all capable of having their own ideas.
“It is very challenging,” he says.
There is also the matter of being a Chinese son.
Dr. Kim laughs when he explains that his ambitions as a conductor eventually became a hobby because, like many Asian parents, his family had rather different ideas about what a sensible life should look like.
Medicine won…for a while.
Today his clinic is stable, he says, and that has given him the freedom to return seriously to music. In fact, he has plonked a rather fine baby grand piano in the middle of his reception, getting up half way through our interview to give an imporomptu recital—as a pair of bewildered tourists wandered in for a bit of Botox.
Last year, the orchestra performed The Phantom of the Opera to a full house.
That, perhaps, is the encouraging bit because an orchestra cannot be built simply by persuading musicians to play. It needs listeners.
The sound of a city
A full orchestra is something many people in Chiang Mai have never actually experienced.
There is a physicality to it. The beginning is almost nothing — the quiet, the musicians waiting, the conductor lifting his arms — and then suddenly there is sound coming from everywhere. Strings moving together. A swell of music filling the room. Then silence again.
Dr. Kim is fascinated by that contrast.
“The waves of music, the silence, the juxtaposition of the power,” he says. “It’s a unique offering of its own.”
He is also realistic about the obstacles. Chiang Mai has very few proper performance halls. There is no bottomless pool of sponsorship. Classical musicians still tend to leave for Bangkok because that is where the opportunities are.
And yet there are musicians here.
There are children learning instruments. There are university students. There are professionals who have returned home. There are people like Putter who have built entire careers around instruments despite never studying music formally.
What is missing is the connective tissue.
That is what Dr. Kim and Putter are trying to build…with all of our help.
Eventually, Dr. Kim would like to bring international musicians to Chiang Mai to perform and teach workshops. He wants young musicians here to encounter standards they might otherwise have to travel abroad to experience.
Education, he says, is the most important thing in life. He knows this personally. Education changed his own circumstances. Now he would like music to do something similar for other young people.
For the moment, though, it begins with six concerts.
The Little Swan on September 19th. The Concerto Concert on October 24th.Then four months of Mozart, taking audiences from the prodigy to Vienna, through the masterpieces and finally to the farewell.
Perhaps this is how an orchestra begins…Not with a grand hall, an endowment and a hundred musicians.
Perhaps it begins with two old university friends, a doctor who never quite stopped playing the violin, a musical instrument technician who taught himself double bass, a handful of stubborn musicians and a city that could use a little more music.
And a conductor raising his baton.
The Little Swan: Cello Solo and String Ensemble Concert
Saturday, September 19, 2026, 7–9pm
Glass House, Cross Chiang Mai Riverside Hotel
Tickets: 1,200 baht, including one complimentary drink; children aged 7–12, 800 baht.
The Concerto Concert
Saturday, October 24, 2026, 7–9pm
Sukhothai Room, Shangri-La Chiang Mai Hotel
Tickets: 2,000 baht Zone A; 1,500 baht Zone B; 1,000 baht Zone C.
Reservations and enquiries: Chiang Mai Serenade String Orchestra Facebook page or LINE @cnxsso
