Jennifer Koh

Forbes
By Tom Teicholz
April 10, 2022
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Everything Rises For Jennifer Koh And Davone Tines

Jennifer Koh & Davóne Tines performing Everything RisesPhoto by Bailey Holiver. Courtesy of CAP UCLA

Last night, I attended a performance, Everything Rises at Royce Hall presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA), co-created and featuring Grammy-winning classical violinist Jennifer Koh and Bass-Baritone Davóne Tines with music by Ken Ueno. It had premiered the night before at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s St. Anthony’s Chapel.

Everything Rises is a work of such originality and, at the same time, a so deeply personal exploration of identity by both Koh and Tines that it is challenging to describe.

Koh is Korean-American, and Tines is Black and gay. Very often they are the only people of color in their respective orchestral and symphonic performances. As classical performers, both live with the challenge of presenting as distinctive individuals while performing as part of a collective and under another’s direction. As persons of color in the classical world and in American society, they have succeeded at code switching – but at what cost? Everything Rises, which was developed with an all BIPOC creative team, represents a musical declaration of self, an acknowledgement of past and present racism, and hope for a better future.

The performance begins with Koh standing on stage silent, head down, not moving as behind her footage plays of Koh at 17 performing in the last round of the International Tchaikovsky Competition where she won the top medal. There is also footage of her Korean-born mother, Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh, who escaped from North Korea and experienced harsh treatment during the Korean war. In the film clip, she is apologizing to Jennifer for Jennifer being first generation in this country and her mother being an immigrant.

As Koh uses her violin to almost deconstruct its sound, using a bow whose long horsehairs fall freely from its tip, Tines takes the stage to vocalize. At first, they are each dressed as they might for a classical performance with Tines in Tails and Koh in a gown. Later, they will change into clothes that better reflect their interior lives (with Tines eventually appearing in what I can only describe as a Billy Porter style Men’s gown).

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