Koh closes first Fortas season with a solo Bach marathon
Jennifer Koh performed Bach’s complete works for solo violin Sunday at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Photo: C. Downey/WCR
Jennifer Koh has reinvigorated the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts series at the Kennedy Center through her first complete season of programming as artistic director. This journey, which included an all-day immersive new music festival last November, came to a triumphant conclusion Sunday afternoon. The Korean-American violinist, with electric pink hair, stood alone on the Terrace Theater stage, with her instrument but no music stand, to play all of J.S. Bach’s Solo Sonatas and Partitas.
When she took up the post, Koh could not have foreseen the political turmoil that would ensue at the artistic venue by the Potomac. While many of her colleagues there have chosen to resign, Koh has remained in spite of it all. The Kennedy Center, and those listeners who are willing to support her in this resolve—the house was sold out on Sunday—are the richer for it.
Koh’s reputation in recent years has rested on her championship of contemporary music. Even in her three-disc recording of Bach’s “Sei Solo,” which she called “Bach and Beyond,” she augmented Bach pairings with solo violin pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries. In this illuminating concert played without a score, she instead let the six Bach works, which violinist Gidon Kremer once called the “Bible of Music,” stand on their own.
The experience showed more than Koh’s impressive stamina and prodigious memory: she is quite simply an outstanding interpreter of Bach’s music. The summa of the set’s accomplishments are the three fugues, extraordinary for how Bach wrote contrapuntally for an instrument accustomed to playing a single melodic line. In each case Koh set the music at a consistently maintained tempo, always highlighting the primary line and unweaving the others spooled around it with exceptional clarity.
The fugue of Sonata No. 3, the longest and most contrapuntally ornate, revealed Koh’s intellectual acumen as particularly astute, especially the section with the theme presented in inversion. Koh’s choice of this sonata as the last piece of the set in her recording seemed to signal its importance to her interpretation, although she played the pieces in numerical order at this concert. The opening motif of the fugue’s subject, which alludes to the Pentecost chorale “Komm, heiliger Geist, Herre Gott,” drew attention to the fact that churches around the world had celebrated Pentecost that very morning.
Koh preferred a tone mostly shorn of vibrato throughout the set, generally repeating only the A section of the dances, which helped keep the concert’s duration under three hours. Her sense of propulsive rhythm, kept in mostly strict meter, enlivened the dance movements of the three Partitas with verve and coordinated movement. She preferred a centered stillness in her approach, rather than emphasizing the virtuosity required or luxuriating in the richness of her instrument’s splendid tone. The performance had the solemnity of a contemplative prayer.
Of course, there were moments of extraordinary technical skill, including the many instances of multiple-stops, all rendered with consummate precision of intonation. Long patterns of running notes effortlessly fell into groupings that revealed underlying metric shifts. In particular, the Doubles, or heavily ornamented repeats of each movement of Partita No. 1, showcased Koh’s adroit fingering. The fleetness of the Presto double of that suite’s Corrente so impressed that the audience broke into preemptive applause.
The uncontested emotional high point of the set, the extended Chaconne concluding Partita No. 2, did not disappoint either. After a jaunty Corrente, a Sarabande marked by lonely fragility, and an imposing Giga, the Chaconne fascinated through Koh’s handling of the long form of these variations. Choices of dynamics and pacing ratcheted up tension leading to the shift from D minor to D major, which appeared like a softly glowing sunrise, and again before the somber return to the home key.
At the end of this musical pilgrimage, the sunny E major of Partita No. 3 always serves as a joyous celebration. From the bright-eyed Preludio, through the understated poignancy of the Louré, the unbridled energy of the Gavotte en rondeau, and the graceful simplicity of the concluding Bourrée and Gigue, Koh put the finishing touches on an extraordinary afternoon of music-making.
The Fortas Chamber Music Concerts series returns 7:30 p.m. November 23, with tenor Nicholas Phan and pianist Myra Huang in a program exploring migration and immigration narratives in the United States. kennedy-center.org
