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Jennifer Koh
By her early teens the violinist
Jennifer Koh was already considered one of the world’s best young
classical musicians by those who had seen her perform in national
competitions, and her reputation has only grown since then. A native
of Chicago, Illinois, Koh began studying violin at age three,
performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at 13, and has since
played with a host of top orchestras around the world, including the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Czech Philharmonic, the Cleveland
Orchestra, and the KBS Symphony of Seoul, South Korea. She is known
for the insight and appreciation she brings to her interpretations
of both well-known and obscure compositions, and as many have
observed, she conveys a passion for music that is rare, or at least
rarely so freely demonstrated, even among her fellow musicians. “I
love being on stage,” Koh, then 14, told Shirley Barnes in a story
about rising young stars for the Chicago Tribune (February
17, 1991). “People talk about stage fright, but I just enjoy being
up there.” In 2003, reviewing a performance Koh gave as a soloist
with the Grant Park Orchestra, in Chicago, Ted Shen wrote for the
Chicago Tribune (June 29, 2003), “Her playing is so fluent and
assured that she can breeze through the toughest technical hurdles,
and she's exciting to watch, a petite firebrand who revels in
emotional display. Yet, she's also capable of the delicate touch and
beguiling sweetness.” Koh tours extensively, playing roughly 100
concerts a year, in which she is featured both with orchestras and
in solo recitals. She has given recitals at such venues as Carnegie
Hall, in New York; the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C.; the
Marlboro Music Festival; and the Ravinia Festival. Koh has also
recorded albums for several labels, on which she has explored
parallels between pieces from widely different eras and showcased
the work of lesser-known—though to her mind eminently
worthy—composers. While her performance repertoire consists largely
of classics by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and other universally
known names, Koh has, as Jeremy Eichler noted for the New York
Times (January 20, 2004), “distinguished herself as an
adventurous musician with a flair for performing contemporary
music”—including concertos by the New York downtown avant-gardist
John Zorn and the West Coast–based composer Lou Harrison.
It was a piece by Harrison, the
Indonesian-influenced Concerto in Slendro, that Koh played at
the 2003 opening of Zankel Hall, a 644-seat facility located
directly below Carnegie Hall. Several years earlier she had given
her first performance at Carnegie Hall, playing Mozart’s Concerto
in A Major with the New York String Orchestra, conducted by
Jaime Laredo. Her many other career highlights include a performance
of Tan Dun’s Water Passion, conducted by the composer at New
York’s South Street Seaport, and annual appearances at Italy’s
Spoleto Festival. Koh told Wynne Delacoma for the Chicago
Sun-Times (June 26, 2005), “I knew from when I was very young
that I wanted music in my life. But it was never very
career-oriented for me; it was always musically oriented.
Ultimately, that developed [into the desire] to become a great
musician, a great artist.” Still, she added, “I am in no way saying
I'm a finished artist. I hope I'm not. That's an ongoing process.”
Jennifer Koh was born on October 8,
1976, the only child of Gertrude Koh, a professor of library
science, and John Koh, a small-business owner. Her parents had moved
to the United States from Korea and settled in the Chicago area in
the 1960s; Koh grew up in the suburb of Glen Ellyn. When she was
three years old, her parents enrolled her in a program at nearby
Wheaton College to learn music through the Suzuki method, which
introduces very young children to instrumental study; she took up
the violin, she has said, because the class for that instrument was
the only one open at the time. At age eight she began studying under
the renowned instructors Roland and Almita Vamos at the Music Center
of the North Shore (now known as the Music Institute of Chicago).
Each week the couple traveled from Minnesota, where they were
professors, to teach gifted students in Chicago. Almita Vamos told
Barnes in 1991, “Jennifer's one of the few young children I know
who's totally happy playing the violin. She doesn't regret having to
sacrifice [her time].” She said about Koh several years later, in a
conversation with Elaine Guregian for the Akron (Ohio) Beach
Journal (January 23, 1997), “She's not laid back at all. She
likes a challenge. She can be a very sweet person and also
temperamental. You can hear it when she plays.” Koh made her concert
debut at 11. At 12 she placed among the finalists at the Folkeston
Menuhin International Competition, in Kent, England, and she earned
top honors at the same contest two years later. She performed with
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at 13. Koh also participated in a
number of other activities, including track, ice skating, and
ballet, before her parents pressed her to choose between her two
favorites—violin or competitive swimming. Koh reportedly did not
waver in her choice, telling James D. Watts Jr. for the Tulsa
(Oklahoma) World (January 12, 2001), “I grew to love music, and
I reached the point where I could not imagine not playing and
performing.”
In 1991, when she was a freshman at
Benet Academy, a high school in Lisle, Illinois, Koh won the
prestigious National Concerto Competition, earning a prize of
$5,000. In 1993 she won first prize in the Irving M. Klein
International String Competition, held in San Francisco, California,
which included a prize of $9,500. The following year, at age 17, Koh
tied for top violin prize and won all of the special prizes,
including best performance of a Tchaikovsky work, at the
International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. (She had won the
gold medal in the contest’s Young Musicians category in 1992.)
During the 1994–95 concert season, she won two of the country's top
music prizes: the Concert Artists Guild Competition and an Avery
Fisher Career Grant. “When it comes to violin competitions,”
Delacoma observed for the Chicago Sun-Times (June 30, 1994),
“Glen Ellyn teenager Jennifer Koh is a regular Energizer bunny: She
just keeps winning and winning and winning . . .”
Koh attended Oberlin College, in
Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English and a
performance diploma in music from the Oberlin Conservatory in 1997.
Though she continued to perform in contests during college, she
devoted more time to her literature classes—an unusual route for a
musician with the kind of credentials she had already established.
“I think I surprised a lot of people when I decided to go for the
English degree,” she told Delacoma in 2005. “I needed that time to
grow up, to open a lot of doors to different sources of knowledge. I
was able to meet a lot of people who are passionate about things
other than music. That was very important for me personally.” After
graduating Koh attended the Curtis Institute of Music, in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she studied under the famous
violinist Jaime Laredo, who would become a close friend and frequent
professional collaborator. “I adore that lady,” Laredo told Delacoma
about Koh in 2005. “She was one of the greatest people to teach and
work with. Most of the students I get at Curtis are 14 or 15. Being
a little bit older, she was on a different level. She had such great
interest in all facets of music. . . . You don't get many students
like that. She was just like a sponge. Whatever she was doing, it
was never enough. She always wanted more.” At Curtis Koh was also
instructed by another distinguished violinist, Felix Galimir, who
earlier in the century had worked with such legendary composers as
Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. Koh greatly appreciated having a
living connection to those past musical greats. “I've always been
very intrigued by composers,” she told Delacoma in 2005. “But having
known Felix Galimir, I see an amazing kind of relationship between
composers and performers. You're so close to the creative process.”
Koh’s career has been marked by
several collaborative relationships with established artists who
have inspired her. After she won the gold medal in the Young
Musicians category at the Tchaikovsky Competition, the Russian
composer Andrei Eshpai wrote a piece specifically for her—Violin
Concerto no. 4, which she premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia,
in 1996. Koh told Elaine Guregian, “It was really exciting to have [Eshpai]
asking ‘How exactly do you interpret this?' and to see this whole
creative process work.” Koh's performance of that piece was included
with two others on the 1998 recording Andrei Eshpai Edition,
Volume Number 1. As a result of that collaboration, she was asked to
record music by the Finnish composer Uuno Klami (1900–61). The
recording, Whirls: Act 1, appeared in 1997. Koh also
developed a fruitful relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti, a famous
Italian composer and librettist, who in 1958 founded the Spoleto
Festival, in Italy, at which Koh performs annually. Koh has
vacationed with the elderly composer and his son, Francis, the
festival’s current director, at Menotti’s castle in Scotland. In
2001 she made a live recording of Menotti's Violin Concerto
with the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, conducted by Richard Hickox, as
part of a birthday celebration for the composer, who turned 90. “I
really feel this is one of the most beautiful violin concerti out
there,” Koh told Donald Rosenberg for the Cleveland Plain Dealer
(August 22, 2003). “It's a shame it's not part of the standard
repertoire. It was so special to have a chance not only to record it
but to play it for Gian Carlo, who's been such a wonderful mentor
and supporter.”
Koh’s first solo recording was
Solo Chaconnes (2001), which included Bach’s Chaconnes for
Solo Violin along with works by the composers Richard Barth (Ciacona
in B Minor, 1908) and Max Reger (Chaconne in G Minor,
1914). that year she also performed Contes des Fees, a violin
concerto by John Zorn, at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University,
in New York. In 2004 Koh’s album Violin Fantasies was
released on the Cedille recording label. The album contains four
pieces, each by a different composer and from a different period,
all of them “fantasies”—free-form, imaginative explorations—written
for violin. Koh was accompanied by the pianist Reiko Uchida on works
by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ornette
Coleman. Portraits, Koh's recording of violin concertos by
the composers Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937), Bohuslav Martinu
(1890–1959), and Be´la Bartok (1881–1945), was released in May 2006.
Reviewing that recording, on which Koh accompanied the Grant Park
Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kalmar, Mark Swed wrote for the
Los Angeles Times (July 23, 2006) that Koh “brings fresh
rapture” to the music. Koh's album of the complete Schumann Sonatas
for Violin and Piano, with accompaniment by Reiko Uchida, is
scheduled to appear in 2007. Koh also performed with others on a
1997 recording of concertos by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen
(1865–1931).
In addition to performing and
recording, Koh has earned much praise for her involvement in music
education. She serves on the board of directors of the National
Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, a scholarship program
for high-school students. In 2001 she founded Jennifer Koh’s Music
Messenger program, for which she performs in classrooms around the
world. The program, which she began as a way of addressing the lack
of classical-music education in schools, was later expanded to
include schools with music classes as well. Koh told Jacob
Stockinger for the Wisconsin State Journal (March 11, 2004)
that the program was “a mix of playing the violin and unpeeling all
the layers of music—the difference between loud and soft passages,
phrasing, the use of color, vibrato. It's becoming aware of music
everywhere around us as a conversation. It connects music to
everyday life.” Koh schedules appearances at schools in cities she
tours as a performer. She told Stockinger that the program is
designed to reach those children whose parents do not ordinarily
take them to classical-music concerts: “For me, it’s a very
idealistic thing about reaching other people in the community who
aren't ticket holders and for children to realize there is another
voice they can speak through. It's about giving kids a voice and a
different form to express themselves in an artistic way.” Koh also
gives lectures and teaches master classes for students at the
high-school and college levels.
For nearly a decade Koh has performed
on a Stradivarius, a creation of the famed Italian
stringed-instrument maker Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737). The
violin, made in 1727 and known as the “Ex Grumiaux Ex General DePont,”
was lent to her by private sponsors—a couple who have chosen to
remain anonymous. The violin has an impressive history: one of its
several owners was the Belgian violinist Arthur Grumiaux (1921–86),
who used it to record sonatas by Mozart and Bach. Koh’s sponsors
were reportedly moved to allow Koh to use the violin after
witnessing one of her performances. Koh told Beth Ramirez de
Arellano for the Pensacola (Florida) News Journal (March 2,
2005), “The moment I played it, I knew it was my soulmate.”
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