Jennifer Koh

The Rehearsal Studio
By Stephen Smoliar
October 24, 2021
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Koh and Mazzoli Share Final PIVOT Program

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented the final program prepared for this season’s series of PIVOT Festival concerts. (The final performance will take place this afternoon, when Lyra will be performed a second time in the Taube Atrium Theater.) The program marked the thirteenth appearance of Jennifer Koh with SFP, having made regular visits since January of 2003.

Koh presented a program consisting entirely of music by Missy Mazzoli. Most of her selections were solo violin compositions, sometimes with computer accompaniment. A few of the pieces required keyboard accompaniment, either on piano or an electronic device. For those performances Koh was joined by Mazzoli herself, serving as accompanist.

The two of them seem to have had a long and beneficial partnership. Indeed, my own serious listening experience of Mazzoli’s music dates back to the first of the three Bach & Beyond albums that Koh released, in which Mazzoli’s “Dissolve, O My Heart” served as a “prelude” to Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor. Thus, in my own personal context, it seemed fitting that last night’s program should begin with “Dissolve, O My Heart.”

Here in the Bay Area Mazzoli is probably best known as the composer of Breaking the Waves, which was performed by West Edge Opera in the summer of 2019. Opera has figured heavily in Mazzoli’s catalogue, but my experiences with her chamber music have not gone much further than Koh’s Bach project. For better or worse, the brief note in the program book, written jointly by Koh and Mazzoli, said nothing about any of the selections they had prepared for performance. All one had were the titles on the program sheet, which were, at best, enigmatic.

What was far from enigmatic, however, was the dexterous virtuosity that Koh brought to the technical demands of each of Mazzoli’s compositions. All of those pieces were relatively short in duration, a point that Mazzoli discussed during the post-performance discussion moderated by Sarah Cahill. I found myself thinking of the opening text phrase that Charlotte Elliott wrote for the hymn “Just as I Am,” suggesting that each piece amounted to a gesture that that disclosed some personal perspective on the part of the composer.

How that perspective is established, however, seems to be left to how the listener experiences the performance. Ironically, Mazzoli seems to have her own inspirations drawn from hymnody. Her “A Thousand Tongues” is a clear reference to Charles Wesley’s “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

While Mazzoli may not have expected listeners to probe the semantic denotations and connotations of her titles, there was no questioning her understanding of violin technique that seems to have emerged from a long-standing friendship with Koh. Mazzoli’s compositions may have been short, but they imposed prodigious technical demands. Koh rose impressively to every challenge that Mazzoli had set for her; and, in the process, she may have endowed the music with a layer of subjectivity that reflected her own personal impressions, rather than those of the composer.

It would probably be fair to say that a program of nine unfamiliar short pieces (followed by an encore) provided the attentive listener with a path along which acquaintance would begin to form. Koh’s mastery of Mazzoli’s technical demands meant that there was always a point of focus. Getting to the music behind the technique, however, required gradual assimilation. In my case I felt that, by the end of the program, I was beginning to appreciate rhetorical elements in Mazzoli’s instrumental music that had been more explicit in my encounter with her opera.

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