About:
Jennifer Koh
Jennifer Koh is recognized for her intense, commanding performances, delivered with dazzling virtuosity and technical assurance. Since the 1994-95 season when she won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Ms. Koh has been heard with leading orchestras and conductors around the world.
Also a prolific recitalist, she appears frequently at major music centers and festivals. She is dedicated to performing the violin repertoire of all eras from traditional to contemporary, believing that the past and present form a continuum. In 2009, she debuted Bach and Beyond, a series of three recitals that explore the history of the solo violin repertoire from Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas to works by modern day composers. This season Ms. Koh performs the second recital in the series, comprising Bach’s Sonata No. 1 and Partita No. 1, with Bartók’s Sonata and a new Partita by Phil Kline in New York, Toronto and Berkeley. She will also perform Bach’s complete solo works in a single concert – a feat considered the ultimate test of a violinist’s command of their instrument – in Houston.
Ms. Koh recently introduced a project called Two x Four, celebrating the teacher/student relationship through music. Named for two violinists and four works, Ms. Koh and Jaime Laredo, her former teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, perform double concerti by Bach, Glass, Anna Clyne and David Ludwig. Two x Four is presented this season by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Curtis Chamber Orchestra on tour in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Ms. Koh also commemorates the centennial of Lutosławski’s birth in 2013, performing Chain 2 with the New York Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestra.
Ms. Koh brings the same sense of adventure and brilliant musicianship to her recordings. Her recent albums include Rhapsodic Musings: 21st Century Works for Solo Violin and the Grammy nominated String Poetic. Her new album, featuring Bach and Beyond, was released in October 2012.
