Jennifer Koh

Jennifer Koh, Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, headlines an album of Tchaikovsky’s complete works for violin and orchestra. It’s the “remarkable . . . thoughtful and vibrant” (Strings Magazine) American violinist’s first recording of music by Tchaikovsky, who has figured prominently in her rise to the top ranks of violinists worldwide. Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major is one of the most celebrated and daunting works in the violin repertoire. The subdued Sérénade mélancolique illustrates the composer’s ear for orchestral color. The delicate Valse-Scherzo melds old-fashioned elegance with spirited playfulness. Souvenir d’un lieu cher’s poignant, nostalgic mood gives way to a delightful finale.

Koh shared the top prize in the 1994 Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow, where she played the Tchaikovsky (and Brahms) concerto and won three special prizes, including for the best performance of Tchaikovsky’s work. The star violinist has a long history with her album collaborators, Denmark’s Odense Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor, Alexander Vedernikov. In recent years, audiences have heard Koh perform the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the Munich Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Carlos Miguel Prieto, Japan’s NHK Symphony under Vedernikov, and the Odense Symphony Orchestra under Christoph Poppen. 

Back to Top

Violinist Jennifer Koh’s Bach & Beyond Part II is the newest installment in a three-CD cycle based on her groundbreaking, multiyear recital series of the same name. Koh, “a masterly Bach interpreter and a champion of contemporary repertory” (The New York Times), performs J. S. Bach’s landmark violin Sonatas and Partitas alongside 20th and 21st century solo violin works they’ve inspired, including new commissions.

Bach & Beyond Part II offers J.S. Bach’s expressive Sonata No. 1 and contemplative Partita No. 1 for solo violin, Bela Bartok’s lyrical Sonata for Solo Violin, and the world premiere recording of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s alluring, otherworldly Frises for violin and electronics.

ALSO AVAILABLE
Bach & Beyond Part I
Bach & Beyond Part III

Back to Top

Renowned violinists Jennifer Koh and her distinguished mentor Jaime Laredo illuminate captivating connections between student and teacher, and composers across the centuries, in Two x Four, an album of four double-violin concertos, performed with the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble conducted by Vinay Parameswaran.

The compositional touchstone is J.S. Bach's Violin Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043, an innovative work that introduced new ways for two solo violins to converse with each other and with orchestra.

Koh and Laredo leap from the Baroque to the late 20th-century for Philip Glass's attractive, hypnotically undulating Echorus on the theme of compassion. It was written for the great Yehudi Menuhin and his protégé, Edna Mitchell.

Two new works commissioned expressly for the project receive world premiere recordings. Anna Clyne's impressionistic Prince of Clouds is "a winner . . . . This is music one can listen to again and again and find new things to appreciate each time" (Chicago Tribune). David Ludwig's evocative Seasons Lost, a contemporary counterpart to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, is "full of beautiful ideas contrasting with playful/menacing Vivaldian gestures" (Philadelphia Inquirer).

Back to Top

Grammy-nominated violinist Jennifer Koh and virtuoso pianist Shai Wosner play 20th-century works by three remarkable Central European composers who intertwine folkloric influences with their own unmistakable originality.

The album includes Leoš Janáček’s Moravian influenced Sonata for violin and piano, Béla Bartók’s impassioned Violin Sonata No. 1, and compelling miniatures by György Kurtág, including Tre Pezzi for violin and piano and selections from Signs, Games and Messages.

The Philadelphia Inquirer praised Koh’s “strikingly beautiful” playing in the Bartok sonata. Wosner brought a “diaphanous tone deeply sympathetic to the Debussy-like writing” to the Janáček.

Back to Top

Bach & Beyond Part I is the first in a three-part series of studio recordings based on her challenging and inventive recital series that explores the history of the solo violin repertoire from Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas to modern day composers including newly commissioned works.

"Koh consistently dives wholeheartedly into her material and plays with decisive articulation and a full, focused tone." New Jersey Star-Ledger

"Koh‘s Bach & Beyond Part 1 demonstrates the violinist’s ability to tackle the most technically difficult and melodically tangled music with clarity and ease." The Contrapuntist

ALSO AVAILABLE
Bach & Beyond Part II
Bach & Beyond Part III

Back to Top

Jennifer Koh, violin
Robert Spano, conductor
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Jennifer Higdon: The Singing Rooms

"The Singing Rooms," a violin concerto with an equally important part for chorus, was sparked by a request from violinist Jennifer Koh, for whom Higdon had previously composed a sonata with piano called String Poetic (2006). The piece is part of a commissioning consortium with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra with funding through grants from the NEA and the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund.

Back to Top

Works by Elliott Carter, Esa-Pekka Salonen,
Augusta Read Thomas and John Zorn

When Jennifer Koh performs new music, she invests "her entire heart and soul" in the enterprise (San Francisco Chronicle).

On her album, Rhapsodic Musings, Koh brings her "deep musicality and an ear for the fine points of composers’ styles" (The New York Times) to works from the dawn of the 21st century by Elliott Carter, John Zorn, Augusta Read Thomas, and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Koh’s playing is sure to win new fans for Carter’s Four Lauds (1984–2000), a series of ingenious miniatures commemorating fellow musicians; Zorn’s mystical Goetia (2002), eight occult incantations using the same sequence of 277 pitches; Thomas’s blazing Pulsar (2002), which the composer describes as a "passionate, urgent, seductive" musical journey of self-discovery; and Salonen’s chaconne-like Lachen Verlernt (2002), a mini-drama that gains momentum as it unfolds with sounds "both furious and strangely gorgeous" (Los Angeles Times).

Back to Top

Grammy Nomination for Best Chamber Music Performance!

Jennifer Koh, violin
Reiko Uchida, piano

World Premieres of works by Jennifer Higdon and Lou Harrison, plus music by John Adams and Carl Ruggles.

One of music’s brightest young stars, “prodigiously talented” (The New York Times) violinist Jennifer Koh presents a hand-picked program of inventive and attractive American works for violin and piano, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.

The album takes its name from Jennifer Higdon’s String Poetic (2006), written expressly for Ms. Koh -- a world-premiere recording. Its diverse moods, harmonic approaches, and styles take full advantage of Ms. Koh’s wide musical palette.

The CD also features Carl Ruggles’ atmospheric and enigmatic Moods (1918); Lou Harrison’s dance-infused Grand Duo (1988), and John Adams’ propulsive Road Movies (1995).

Ms. Koh’s “penetrating intelligence,” “white-hot imagination,” and “focused, sweet-toned playing” (Washington Post) are brilliantly displayed on this album of exhilarating American discoveries.

Back to Top

Jennifer Koh, violin
Reiko Uchida, piano

Playing and recording the Schumann Sonatas is one of my most personal projects to date. Schumann’s music has always compelled me as a musician and a listener for as long as I can remember. Schumann’s music is the most human with its viscerally haunting, obsessive, tender and vulnerable extremes. One can connect a lifetime of experiences - birth, love, hate, death - into every phrase of his music. These disparate experiences are tied together into one life - one phrase - one movement - one sonata - in Schumann’s music.

A single phrase is like a poignant memory that returns and with each visit is reborn more vividly, more passionately, more tenderly than before.
— Jennifer Koh

Back to Top

SZYMANOWSKI: Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35
MARTINU: Violin Concerto No. 2, H. 293
BARTOK: Two Portraits, Op. 5

Grant Park Orchestra
Carlos Kalmar, conductor

"10/10 - Koh offers three works for violin and orchestra by three very different Eastern European composers, none of them over-exposed and all of them distinctive. In other words, the complete program is as coherent and well thought-out as the performances are outstanding." - ClassicsToday.com

"Jennifer Koh is a risk-taking, high-octane player of the kind who grabs the listener by the ears and refuses to let go. . . . A scorching talent that should on no account be missed." - The Strad

Back to Top

Jennifer Koh, violin
Reiko Uchida, piano

"What a truly sensational disc this is! Awards are often given for best instrumental, orchestral, vocal, chamber music discs. I find Cedille Records CDR 90000 073 simply one of the few great CDs." (Audiophile Audition)

"Fantasy" offers a composer one of the freest possible musical forms. When I first began thinking about this recording, I saw an opportunity to present a program of four very different composers speaking through this very free form in their distinct voices. In the months preceding the recording sessions, I lost two friends in close succession. Fortunately, I had the work of preparing these fantasies to delve into. In the midst of my preparations, I began to perceive a common thread among the pieces, besides the theme of "fantasy." I began to understand each piece as a life's journey. Each fantasy expressed itself as an entire life to me: a search to find one's own path with all of its joys and struggles along the way. I would like to dedicate this recording to my two friends and to the celebration of life. — Jennifer Koh

Back to Top

Gian Carlo Menotti
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra

Spoleto Festival Orchestra
Richard Hickox, conductor

Recorded live at the 2001 Spoleto Festival, Italy.

Back to Top