Jennifer Koh to Perform Bach's Complete Sonatas and Partitas at Miller Theatre
The Grammy winner's 2026-27 season also includes concertos by Barber, Glass, and Dai-Keong Lee.
Grammy Award-winning violinist Jennifer Koh will perform all six of J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, one of the most demanding undertakings in the violin repertoire, at Miller Theatre at Columbia University on Thursday, September 24 at 7:00 p.m.
Spanning nearly three hours, Bach's complete Sonatas and Partitas demand extraordinary physical stamina, technical command, and expressive range. A cornerstone of Koh's repertoire, the works reveal the full depth of an artistry she has brought to Bach over decades. As The New York Times wrote, “Bach's monumental set is less a peak to be surmounted than a journey that warrants return excursions and encourages consideration of manifold paths. Jennifer Koh, a superbly gifted violinist, has proved to be a steadfast and sure surveyor of this terrain.”
Koh has returned to Bach's Sonatas and Partitas throughout her career, continually finding new possibilities within the music. The same spirit of curiosity that drives her advocacy for contemporary composers also informs her approach to Bach, allowing these 18th-century works to speak anew to the present.
Koh said, “Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas have long been considered definitive works written for solo violin. These works were never commissioned, nor are they known to have been performed publicly in Bach's lifetime. I have come to understand them as an intensely personal and intimate musical journal that Bach was compelled to write over seventeen years, simply out of a pure need to create. They are a musical expression of his life, his birth, and development as an artist.”
In addition to performing Bach's complete Sonatas and Partitas at Miller Theatre, Koh's 2026–27 season includes Barber's Violin Concerto with the Greater Bridgeport and Phoenix Symphonies and Philip Glass's Violin Concerto No. 1 with the New World Symphony. She joins pianist-composer Vijay Iyer for music from their new project, Scenes of Living and Dying, at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, later bringing the program to Capital Region Concerts and UCLA's Nimoy Theater. She also performs the world premiere of Dai-Keong Lee's Violin Concerto, reconstructed from the composer's surviving sketches, with the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra.
About Jennifer Koh
Grammy Award-winning violinist Jennifer Koh is celebrated for her commanding performances and dedication to both traditional and contemporary repertoire. Equally at home in works from Bach to today's composers, she is recognized for her dazzling virtuosity, wide-ranging musical curiosity, and fearless approach to programming. Koh has premiered more than 100 works and developed groundbreaking commissioning projects that have expanded the contemporary violin repertoire. Her initiatives, including Alone Together, Bach and Beyond, Bridge to Beethoven, and The American Concerto, explore the instrument's evolving voice through dialogue between past and present, multidisciplinary collaboration, and social engagement.
Named Musical America's 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, Koh has won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Concert Artists Guild Competition, received an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and holds an honorary doctorate from the Cleveland Institute of Music. She earned a BA in English literature from Oberlin College and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she worked with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir. An active lecturer, teacher, and recording artist for Cedille Records, her discography includes the Grammy-winning Alone Together, her acclaimed Bach & Beyond series, and her recently released recording The American Concerto Vol. 1, featuring concertos by Vijay Iyer and Courtney Bryan. She is Artistic Director of the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts and founder of ARCO Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on amplifying underrepresented voices in classical music.
Photo Credit: Jürgen Frank
