Jennifer Koh, left, is revamping the venerable chamber music program on the Kennedy Middle in Washington, D.C. with revolutionary programming and group engagement.
Derek Baker/The John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts
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Derek Baker/The John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts
For anybody who thinks classical music is a buttoned up, stuffy outdated artwork kind, Jennifer Koh says, have one other hear.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 collection on the John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Koh, a violinist, took over as creative 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 trade, says “it is actually a tragedy and our loss if we do not hear from individuals in contrast to us.”
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A one-day new music competition in November, Sounds of Us, will characteristic 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 school 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 live shows 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 Imagine (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 all around the nation.
“It is actually a tragedy and our loss if we do not hear from individuals in contrast to us,” Koh informed NPR. “I already know what’s in my head, so what I actually wish to find out about 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 admittedly necessary to me.”
The season blends outdated and new, from the music itself to the very musicians on stage. Later within the season, South Korean piano sensation Yunchan Lim — the youngest individual 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 relating to ensembles, from the excessive vitality, boundary-pushing Third Coast Percussion and the Balourdet Quartet — fashioned 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 live shows mix outdated 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 Middle in Washington, D.C.
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Koh’s 15-year collaboration with composer Missy Mazzoli maybe greatest illustrates her imaginative and prescient for the way forward for classical music. Mazzoli, who’s gone from enjoying 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 suppose by way of style once I’m writing, I do not suppose, 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 Middle’s various lounge-like house, the Membership at Studio Okay. “Each new work is a threat. It is thrilling. One thing is coming into being that can inform us one thing totally different about this world that we reside in.”
Jennifer Koh, proper, featured her distinguished mentor Jaime Laredo, left, final season on the Kennedy Middle in Washington, D.C. for a live performance that includes double concerti for 2 violins, an extension of her “Two X 4” undertaking highlighting connections between instructor and scholar.
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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 known 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 historical therapeutic rituals round one other lethal pandemic — the bubonic plague. The so-called Black Loss of life worn out almost a 3rd of Europe’s inhabitants within the 14th century.
In its full orchestra kind, 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 known 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 collection highlights younger composers and artists, like members of the Juilliard Orchestra, performed right here by Sasha Scolnik-Brower in 2023 for the primary collection live performance during which Jennifer Koh carried out after her appointment as creative director.
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Zach Mahone/The John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts
“There’s a necessity to take creative threat,” Koh mentioned. “As a result of classical music, I would not name it like the biggest moneymaking factor on this planet. So while you take that threat, 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 setting and an area and funding to be able to have that.”
The printed model of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital model was edited by Obed Manuel.