Violinist Jennifer Koh brings Bach to new audiences

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      Jennifer Koh used to be scared to play Johann Sebastian Bach’s music for an audience, but she’s over that now.

      In fact, the Korean-American violinist has emerged as one of the great German’s foremost interpreters, at a time when Bach’s music seems to be everywhere. Through her Bach and Beyond series she’s helping new audiences look at this old music through the lenses of intimacy and influence, performing Bach’s music for solo violin in conjunction with 20th- and 21st-century works inspired by the greatest of all church composers.

      “The interest has always been there,” Koh says of her own engagement with Bach’s work, “but for a long time I didn’t perform Bach in public. And then at a certain point, around his 325th anniversary year, I started asking myself why.”

      In a telephone conversation from a Los Angeles tour stop, the New York resident explains that she was unnerved by the notion of having to put her own spin on some of the most intimate music Bach ever composed.

      “You know, Bach wrote this music out of pure creative need,” she says of the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin. “He was never commissioned to write this music; it was never required of him.…So, for me, there’s a kind of purity that’s required in this kind of music-making. And there’s a vulnerability, because it’s very personal music. So that’s one component of why I found it terrifying.

      “Another part of it,” she continues, “is the weight of performance practice that has been done before, but this kind of led me to question Bach’s influence on composition as well. His sonatas and partitas are still considered the pinnacle of works written for solo violin, so I wanted to see, as well, how his writing has influenced composers throughout time.”

      The third installment of her Bach and Beyond series, which Koh will present in a Music on Main concert this Thursday, features the Leipzig legend’s Sonata No. 2 in A Minor and Sonata No. 3 in C Major, sandwiching Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII and the Canadian premiere of John Harbison’s For Violin Alone.

      The first of the two historical compositions serves as a kind of prologue, setting Bach up as the radical new voice of his time. “I see, in the first sonata, that he is working within forms that have existed before—the sonata form, the dance movements,” Koh explains. “He takes those forms and really makes them his own, but over time he comes into his own element and begins breaking those central rules. For example, in the second sonata he stops ending on the tonic in every movement, so there’s a kind of open-endedness to it, and in the third movement it’s almost like his heartbeat, his artistic heartbeat, is born.”

      Sequenza VIII, in turn, pays abstract homage to Bach’s use of the chaconne, while For Violin Alone applies Bach-like techniques to American folk forms. Both, Koh says, are “masterful” continuations of Bach’s legacy—and ample evidence that the most influential musician of all time remains just that.

      Jennifer Koh plays a Music on Main concert at Heritage Hall on Thursday (March 12).

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