On Friday and Saturday, (Jennifer Koh) will perform the 2022 violin concerto, “Procession,” which composer and friend Missy Mazzoli wrote just for her.
Also on the weekend program, guest conductor Dalia Stasevska will lead the Grand Teton Festival Orchestra in a symphonic dance by Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) and the Symphony No. 2 in D Major by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957).
“The first piece Missy ever wrote for me was to be paired with the ‘Ciaccona,’” Koh said last week, speaking from backstage at the Aspen Music Festival, where she had just completed a duo concert with Mazzoli on piano.
That work, “Dissolve, O My Heart,” was written for Koh’s three-recital “Bach and Beyond” project, which paired Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin with works by 20th- and 21st-century composers in an effort to “strengthen the connection between” Bach and “our present world,” she wrote in a statement about the performances. Both start with a striking, even chilling chord unheard of in the 18th century on the violin.
“Procession,” which Koh premiered with the National Symphony Orchestra in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and which she keeps in steady rotation, opens with a similarly affecting chord, with slippery, sliding tones from both orchestra and violin, and short, nearly whispered phrases from the soloist interrupted by bursts of the ensemble. “It’s a cliché,” Koh said, “but it is a journey.”
On the other side of “Procession” comes Sibelius’ Second Symphony (1902), for which Stasevska is particularly suited to lead, having trained at the Sibelius Academy, served as artistic director of the Sibelius Festival and married bassist Lauri Porra, the great-grandson of Finland’s national musical hero.
