Q&A with Jennifer Koh

For violinist Jennifer Koh, the music of Bach is a canvas, one she returns to often with the colors of her own life.

Tonight's program in particular—Bach's complete works for unaccompanied violin, the six Sonatas and Partitas—is a signature touchstone. She's performed the cycle at Miller Theatre before: first across a 2010 lunchtime series, then in 2011, when she opened Miller's Bach and the Baroque series by playing all six works. It’s an unusual marathon she's repeated in other settings, including at the Kennedy Center in 2025.

The Partitas and Sonatas are also a creative launch point for Koh. Her Bach and Beyond series pairs these pieces with contemporary music, including works by Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Elliott Carter, with commissions by Phil Kline and John Harbison. She’s taken the cycle further with Bach 6 Solo, a 2021 collaboration with director Robert Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs, staging the Sonatas and Partitas as a full theatrical work, with dancers, lighting, and design built around Koh's live performance.

In returning again to this music, Koh continues tracing her evolution as an artist, and turns a private journey outward to listeners.

Katelyn: How does it feel to be returning to Miller to play these works?

Jennifer: Scary and terrifying. Doing all six sonatas and partitas is one of the most difficult and challenging things, but also one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

Katelyn: How did your relationship with these pieces start?

Jennifer: Solo Bach is something that's been with me my whole life. I started learning it when I was quite young. I was eight the first time I learned the first movement of the E Major Partita.

The first violin recital I heard that really blew my mind was one of the last tours that Nathan Milstein gave. He played only the Chaconne, and I'd never heard it before. I remember thinking, oh my god, what is this? I didn't realize the violin could sound like this.

Katelyn: Can you talk about the journey of playing the whole cycle? How are the works in dialogue with each other?

Jennifer: Everything is contextual, especially when I’m thinking about the larger shape of all six.

How I approach each one is slightly different.

First, you start at the G Minor Sonata. First Partita: B minor. Second Sonata: A minor. Second Partita: D minor. And then you start moving into major.

There's something significant about going through the first sonata, the first partita. Bach is writing within forms that existed before. You have the doubles [an ornamented variation of a dance movement, played immediately after the original dance], which are slightly different. Theoretically, people think that was supposed to be the repeat. But now it's traditionally played separately.

Then in the second sonata, you see a change: at the end of the first movement, he ends on the dominant, not the tonic. Then the fugue is 50% longer than the first sonata, so he's expanding what was there before. Then in the third movement, you have this eighth note, this pulsation that goes underneath the melody. For me, that feels like the first heartbeat of an artist coming into their own.

Then the second partita kind of blows that form out of the water. You have four movements which had existed before. However, 50% of it is the Chaconne, which is totally unlike anything that had been written before. This idea of questioning—which happened already at the end of the first movement of the second sonata, considering that he doesn't go back to tonic. But in the Chaconne, it's minor, major, minor—three huge sections.

There's something so amazing about the last note—D. Are we going back into the light, into major, or are we staying in minor? It becomes this question, this yearning. It's a question that I think stays in the listener's ear.

It's a choice. You've gone through this struggle. It's not about ignoring suffering, the difficult parts in your life. It's about having acknowledged those things, expressed those things, engaged with loss, and then deciding to move into major. That's just crazy remarkable to me.

Then you move into the first movement of the third sonata, C major. It goes into a 16th-note D—the same pitch. What's interesting to me is it relates to that third movement of the second sonata—this elongated, dotted eighth.

Then you have this massive intellectual crown, like he's building a cathedral through the fugue—a huge architectural masterpiece. It starts transforming into joy and happiness. So after you go through this whole lifetime, suddenly in the third to the fourth movement, you see this transformation to joy.

Then you go into the E Major Partita, which is the shortest of all of the sonatas and partitas. In some ways the most traditional. You think it's one thing—it's in major, it seems very straightforward—but it's actually something different. There's no doubles. It's all dance movements. So it's a return, looking backwards, but it changes the meaning of what joy is at the beginning of your life—like a baby laughing versus somebody who's lived through an entire lifetime and has come to the decision to embrace joy.

The context of where and how it's placed…it's amazing to me. It changes the meaning of the work, I think.

Katelyn: This program is close to three hours long. How do you build up the endurance for this performance, mentally and physically?

Jennifer: I really should be working out. I keep telling myself, you should work out today, Jenny. That hasn't happened. I will probably get to it and then be like, why didn't I start this six months earlier?

It is physically challenging. The biggest thing is a psychological, spiritual challenge. It's a kind of meditation—are you able to sustain that for several hours?

Then it's hard because you're so vulnerable. It's so exposed. When I'm doing it, I feel like I'm living in the world with no skin on—even on the street. As a New Yorker, you can't feel every single thing that somebody in one subway car is feeling. But for some reason, when I'm doing this, I become so much more sensitized to every interaction and every feeling that sometimes it feels almost painful to exist in the world. That sounds a little weird. But it's true.

Katelyn: As you continue to live with these works, does your approach change?

Jennifer: All the time, even in fundamental ways, like tempi.

Violinists, we're not like a piano—we can't hold four notes at one time. So much is about voicing: which lines are you bringing out so that it's the clearest? How do you change the character of multiple lines, especially in a fugue? Which aspects are you most engaged with at this moment in your life? Those things shift a lot. And it depends on where you are, emotionally, physically, mentally, or all of those things.

Katelyn: You expanded on this program through the multidisciplinary project Bach 6 Solo. Can you talk about that and why this music feels like a creative source?

Jennifer: Bach serves as a kind of touchpoint for me throughout my life. I see [Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas] as the birth of an artist. It was never commissioned, so he was never paid for it. It feels like this personal diary or journal covering this 17-year span.

When Bob [Wilson] and I did Einstein on the Beach [a four-act opera by Wilson with music composed by Philip Glass], we immediately felt a kind of kinship. It's like we understood each other immediately. That kind of personal, artistic connection to somebody is so rare—maybe three people in my life.

[For our next project], probably the most expected thing would have been something like L’histoire du Soldat [a theatrical work with music by Igor Stravinsky], but I felt that it had to be the most intimate music.

Bach 6 Solo, which I did with Bob and Linda [Lucinda Childs, choreographer], was about the evolution and lifespan of an artist. The stages we created resembled a clock—not exactly, it's not 12 parts. It felt natural to see how these pieces correspond with composers at different points in their lives, different ages, different points of artistic development.

We also explored how we present ourselves to the outside world, and how we actually exist and live on the inside during this process. Those different aspects were clear in the doubles in the first partita—how you present to the world is more like the doubles. It's a little more virtuosic, a little more direct. We spent 10 years making it.

Katelyn: What do you want audiences to take from this performance?

Jennifer: I don't see art as a virtuosic process. I understand that people engage with virtuosity—”wow, it's so fast!”—but that's not something I find interesting. What's important to me is to communicate, to reflect, and engage with the most intimate parts of who we are. It's about going on this very intense and personal journey with what it is to live this life, and also as an artist.

Katelyn Simone is a writer, music journalist, and oboist. She has contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle and Classical Voice North America and is New York correspondent for San Francisco Classical Voice.

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