Washington Classical Review

Jennifer Koh performed a violin recital Thursday night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.

Jennifer Koh’s initial term as artistic director of the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts series at the Kennedy Center was to have ended this spring. In the face of the ongoing chaos at the venue during President Trump’s second term, she has chosen to remain.

Due to Trump hosting the FIFA World Cup draw at the Kennedy Center in December, Koh’s Fortas recital with pianist Thomas Sauer was rescheduled to Thursday evening in the Terrace Theater.

The evening opened with some hints about what will happen to the Fortas series after the imminent closure of the Kennedy Center, and the news is good for a change. A member of the Fortas board made clear that the Fortas series will continue during the center’s two-year closure beginning this July. Significantly, this announcement cited the affirmation of KC executive director Matt Floca, who took over after the departure of Richard Grenell.

The season cannot be announced publicly just yet, but when Koh took the stage with Sauer, she dropped some important hints. The first concert, she said, will be in mid-September, at the start of a full season. As for venues, Koh held out the possibility that at least some concerts will be held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. That venue’s Hammer Auditorium, one of the city’s best acoustics, has not hosted a major concert series since the museum was dissolved in 2014.

Koh asked all audience members and Fortas supporters to send an email to a newly created address ([email protected]) for more information. “Only one person will be checking that address,” she said, implying that most of the Fortas staff would be among the vast majority of employees losing their jobs during the closure.

By most accounts almost all the Kennedy Center staff has been or soon will be dismissed. Outside the KC Thursday evening, former box office employees who used to handle group sales and subscriptions distributed flyers about losing their jobs.

Koh and Sauer’s intriguing program centered on the short-lived friendship of Beethoven with violinist George Bridgetower. The mixed-race virtuoso, born in Poland of a father probably from Barbados, visited Vienna in 1803, where he and Beethoven premiered the Austrian composer’s Violin Sonata No. 9. A prodigy who had played professionally since age 10, Bridgetower reportedly sight-read this complicated work at the first performance. After the premiere the two friends quarreled, leading Beethoven to rededicate the sonata to Rodolphe Kreutzer.

Koh’s take on the slow double-stops opening the first movement lacked boldness, and there were some intonation issues at the top of her range in the Presto section that followed. Both musicians were at their best in the extended slow movement, especially the delicate music-box variation and the tragic variation in the parallel minor. The Finale, exultantly returning to the major key, felt supremely confident from both musicians.

The program opened with Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 1, which proved less successful, with more intonation problems and some scratchy imprecision from Koh. At least part of the problem came from Sauer, an otherwise sensitive partner who tended to rush the tempo in the outer movements of this sonata. Although the basic outline in three movements, with a slow variations in the center, is similar to the “Kreutzer,” it is a much simpler, sunnier piece that felt unfortunately belabored and not quite synchronized on this rendition.

In between came Vijay Iyer’s Bridgetower Fantasy, composed in 2015 for Jennifer Koh and premiered by her. Like much of Iyer’s classical scores, the piece does not seem like much on the page, “a collection of imaginings about George Bridgetower,” as Iyer described it. Koh has a way of working magic with contemporary music, however, and with Sauer’s more collaborative approach, the duo produced some of their most intensely delicate and coordinated ensemble playing.

In three movements, the piece “takes on an episodic character, assembled from contrasting fragments,” as Iyer put it. Koh skilfully avoided harshness, even in the occasional pitchless growls and buzzing sounds Iyer wrote for her. Iyer’s other arena is as a jazz pianist, and that style of music came through in the dance rhythms that abounded in this performance, often punctuated by Sauer’s pulsating taps on the piano lid, like a hidden drum kit. The opening of the first movement, with glowing overtones created from the piano’s strings, had a particularly ghostly effect.

Jennifer Koh promised to post details of the new season of the Fortas series, including locations, on her Instagram page. instagram.com/jenniferkohmusic/