Jennifer Koh Surveys Three French Composers

Jennifer Koh (photograph by Juergen Frank, from Wikimedia Commons Web page, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Last night violinist Jennifer Koh returned to Herbst Theatre to give her fourteenth recital performance for San Francisco Performances. Accompanied at the piano by Thomas Sauer, her program was structured around three French composers from roughly a century ago. She began with the least familiar of those composers, Lili Boulanger, who lived only a quarter century but left a significant repertoire of music from the early twentieth century. The repertoire of the other two composers, Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Fauré (in “order of appearance” on the program) consisted of violin sonatas more familiar to chamber music lovers. Each half of the program also included a more recent composition. Tania León’s “Para Violin y Piano” was situated between Boulanger and Ravel, while Kaija Saariaho’s “Tocar” began the second half of the program.

As has been the case in my many previous recital encounters with Koh, her command of the repertoire was unquestionably solid. Nevertheless, as is often frequently the case, there were offerings that overstayed their welcome. I first became aware of León when I was living in Connecticut in 1981; and I have tried to follow her work since then, even as I moved from one coast to the other. That included keeping up with an album of her orchestral music released this past July. Nevertheless, last night’s selection went on longer than even sympathetic attention could sustain. To be fair, however, I felt the same way about the final movement of Ravel’s second violin sonata in G major, which concluded the first half of the program!

Far more interesting (for me at least) was my encounter with a performance of Kaija Saariaho’s “Tocar.” I became familiar with this piece when I made it a point to start collecting recordings of that composer’s music, during the first decade of the current century. Koh’s performance triggered fond memories of when I first came to know “Tocar” through that collection. The contrast with the Fauré sonata that followed it made the second half of the program the high point of the evening for me.

It is always good (if not healthy) to leave a recital with a sense of satisfaction!