STRING THEORIES

posted by James Reel

    Bits of the latest issue of Strings magazine are online, including my profile of violinist Jennifer Koh:

    You’ve got to love Jennifer Koh for more than just her brain. Oh, sure, at age 17, when she won the top violin prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, she nixed the idea of becoming an instant touring virtuoso and high-tailed it back to Oberlin College to finish her degree—in English literature. And, yes, she had the idea of recording a disc of Szymanowski, Martinü, and Bartók concertos after reading the complete works of Czech novelist and essayist Milan Kundera.
    Yet Koh is most certainly not the sort of person to intellectualize all the emotion out of music. Says her mentor, violinist Jaime Laredo, “She’s very outgoing, almost flamboyant, but in a very good way, not in an ostentatious way. And she really touches the heart, because she plays from the heart.”

    The full article rests here. The issue also contains my interview with violinist Vincent Skowronski about the right way (in his opinion) to play the first-movement cadenza in Mendelssohn’s E-minor violin concerto. Now, unless you’re planning to perform the concerto yourself sometime soon, this may not seem like compelling reading, but Skowronski does have some colorful things to say. F’rinstance: “[Mendelssohn] was refined. Even his physiognomy was refined. What he wrote was refined. So why brutalize the concerto? Among violinists, if you like to chop wood and you want to play Mendelssohn, you have to compromise in the middle and not beat the hell out of it.” If you’re interested, you can find the rest here.