Palm Beach Daily News
By Jan Sjostrom
February 17, 2018
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Violinist forges links between Bach’s music and living composers

The Chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor is arguably the greatest piece of music for solo violin ever composed.

No less an authority than Johannes Brahms declared that with only the violin, “the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings.”

Violinist Jennifer Koh has her own thoughts on the partita’s final movement.

“For me, the Chaconne has always been this struggle to reach some kind of transcendence beyond our physical selves.”

The partita anchors two concerts Koh will play with pianist Reiko Uchida on Monday at the Boca Raton Museum of Art and Tuesday at The Breakers for the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach.

The programs, which differ for each venue, are a spinoff of her Bach and Beyond project, which traces the connections between Bach’s six partitas and sonatas and subsequent solo violin works. Koh brought it into the present with commissions of new work.

“I think it’s important to analyze and humanize composers we’ve calcified as great,” Koh said. “For me, what’s interesting is going back and looking at the musicians and the music itself and getting rid of preconceived notions.”

Watch Koh perform Bach’s Chaconne here

Koh’s impressive resume includes being named Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year and an Avery Fisher Career grant. Bach and Beyond was the first of her many projects designed to preserve classical music as a living art form.

“She’s a very probing musician and quite adventuresome in her programming,” said Michael Finn, the chamber music society’s artistic and executive director.

At The Breakers, Bach’s second partita, which dates from the early 1700s, shares the bill with Leos Janacek’s Sonata for Violin and Piano (1914-15) and Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major (1923-27).

Bach injected popular culture into his partitas by basing them on dance music, Koh said. The Janacek and Ravel pieces are enriched by infusions of Czech folk music, in Janacek’s case, and American blues, in Ravel’s.

The program in Boca Raton includes two contemporary solo violin works: Missy Mazzoli’s Dissolve, O My Heart, which she was inspired to write after hearing about Koh’s Bach and Beyond project, and Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII, composed in 1976.

Bach wrote his violin sonatas and partitas over a 17-year period, beginning around 1703. “That was a long time during a time when lifespans were shorter,” Koh said. “I see the sonatas and partitas as a musical journal of his life.”

The second partita is like nothing that came before it. “That’s where we see him blow the form out of the water,” Koh said.

It begins typically enough with four dance movements of equal length. Then all bets are off with the Chaconne, which takes up half the piece. The Chaconne is a set of 64 dazzling variants on a simple four-measure theme.

Bach wasn’t considered a great composer during his lifetime. Composing was part of his job as a church and court organist, but he was more admired for his virtuoso organ playing.

Koh believes listeners need to give new music a chance, even if they’ve had a bad experience.

“If you see a terrible movie, you don’t just say you hate all movies being made today,” she said.

For all we know the next Bach might be living among us, she said.


If You Go

What: Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach concerts featuring violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Reiko Uchida

When/Where: 6 p.m. reception, 7 p.m. concert Monday, Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton; and 6 p.m. reception, 7 p.m. concert Tuesday, Gold Room, The Breakers, 1 S. County Road

For information: Call 379-6773 or visit cmspb.org

 

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