Jennifer Koh, left, is revamping the venerable chamber music program on the Kennedy Heart in Washington, D.C. with progressive programming and neighborhood engagement.
Derek Baker/The John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts
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Derek Baker/The John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts
For anybody who thinks classical music is a buttoned up, stuffy previous artwork type, Jennifer Koh says, have one other hear.
“I hope everybody comes,” Koh says about her first full season of programming for the Fortas Chamber Music Concert events sequence on the John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Koh, a violinist, took over as inventive director after the demise of her predecessor and collaborator, pianist Joseph Kalichstein, who had served within the function for 1 / 4 century. Fortas, a staple of the classical music scene within the nation’s capital, was heavy on custom. Koh is blowing the mud off and leaning closely into the experimental, the younger and the brand new.
Jennifer Koh, who champions dwelling composers and other people marginalized in an often-exclusive classical music business, says “it is actually a tragedy and our loss if we do not hear from individuals not like us.”
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Derek Baker/The John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts
A one-day new music pageant in November, Sounds of Us, will function greater than 40 newly commissioned works by composers together with Vijay Iyer, David Ludwig, Carlos Simon and Nina C. Younger carried out by highschool and faculty college students enrolled at The Juilliard Faculty and the Nationwide Symphony Orchestra Youth Fellowship program. Some college students will see their very own compositions premiered.
Unfold throughout 4 phases, the concert events mark musical visions of America’s future forward of its 250th anniversary in 2026. They spotlight steps in a musician’s journey: To Start (their pursuit), To Consider (of their dream), To Turn out to be (what they envision) and To Be (a working musician). The centerpiece is a brand new piece by Angélica Negrón that includes on a regular basis sounds recorded and shared by individuals everywhere in the nation.
“It is actually a tragedy and our loss if we do not hear from individuals not like us,” Koh advised NPR. “I already know what’s in my head, so what I actually need to study is what’s in different individuals’s heads… to listen to the voices of people that have had completely totally different experiences from our personal. And to have the ability to advocate and spotlight their work is basically essential to me.”
The season blends previous and new, from the music itself to the very musicians on stage. Later within the season, South Korean piano sensation Yunchan Lim — the youngest particular person to ever win gold on the Van Cliburn Worldwide Piano Competitors, in 2022 at age 18 — performs Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Portuguese grasp Maria João Pires makes a uncommon go to to D.C. Koh herself will carry out Bach’s full sonatas and partitas for solo violin.
There is a equally broad vary in the case of ensembles, from the excessive power, boundary-pushing Third Coast Percussion and the Balourdet Quartet — shaped in 2018 and recipients of this 12 months’s prestigious Avery Fisher Profession Grant — to established teams just like the Miró Quartet and the Takács Quartet.
Some particular person concert events mix previous and new. The Balourdet Quartet will give the D.C. premiere of a piece by College of Chicago PhD scholar Paul Novak, sandwiched between some Mozart and Beethoven.
Composer and pianist Missy Mazzoli performs at an occasion hosted in a club-like house on the Kennedy Heart in Washington, D.C.
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Derek Baker/The John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts
Koh’s 15-year collaboration with composer Missy Mazzoli maybe finest illustrates her imaginative and prescient for the way forward for classical music. Mazzoli, who’s gone from taking part in in punk bands to composing for the Metropolitan Opera, describes herself as an “omnivorous” musician.
“For me, all sound is a possible a part of the palette, and I do not assume by way of style once I’m writing, I do not assume, Oh, I will make this a classical quartet, however with a twist,” Mazzoli mentioned forward of a live performance with Koh in March on the Kennedy Heart’s various lounge-like house, the Membership at Studio Okay. “Each new work is a danger. It is thrilling. One thing is coming into being that can inform us one thing totally different about this world that we stay in.”
Jennifer Koh, proper, featured her distinguished mentor Jaime Laredo, left, final season on the Kennedy Heart in Washington, D.C. for a live performance that includes double concerti for 2 violins, an extension of her “Two X 4” mission highlighting connections between trainer and scholar.
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Zach Mahone/John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts
Individuals gathered round dimly lit spherical tables earlier than a stage glowing in shades of blue and crimson. Koh stepped on stage matching these hues along with her vivid blue hair and sleeveless crimson Napa leather-based gown because the tin of conversations pale into applause.
Mazzoli joined Koh on piano and electronics for a set that included an association of her violin concerto referred to as Procession. She composed it throughout pandemic shutdowns in what was as soon as the Swedish island house of Ingmar Bergman, the reclusive movie director.
The concerto was impressed by historic therapeutic rituals round one other lethal pandemic — the bubonic plague. The so-called Black Dying worn out practically a 3rd of Europe’s inhabitants within the 14th century.
In its full orchestra type, which Koh premiered with the Nationwide Symphony Orchestra in 2022, the concerto ends after a hammer blow to tubular bells and the solo violin bow’s abrupt cease on the strings.
In one other work referred to as All I Need Is All of It, Mazzoli sampled elements of items she has dreamt up and Koh carried out through the years.
The revamped Fortas Chamber Music Concert events sequence highlights younger composers and artists, like members of the Juilliard Orchestra, performed right here by Sasha Scolnik-Brower in 2023 for the primary sequence live performance during which Jennifer Koh carried out after her appointment as inventive director.
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Zach Mahone/The John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts
“There’s a necessity to take inventive danger,” Koh mentioned. “As a result of classical music, I would not name it like the most important moneymaking factor on the earth. So once you take that danger, are you able to assure that each piece goes to be like, I do not know, the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven? No. However you create an surroundings and an area and funding in an effort to have that.”
The printed model of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital model was edited by Obed Manuel.
