Jennifer Koh: The American Concerto, Volume One
Cedille Records

On her sixteenth album for Cedille Records, violinist Jennifer Koh brings her consummate technique and expressive acuity to a new recording series featuring works commissioned through her American Concerto project. Inaugurating the series and featuring the violinist with the Tim Weiss-conducted Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, the first volume couples Vijay Iyer's Trouble with the world premiere recording of Courtney Bryan's Syzygy. Rather than wait for others to write concertos for her, she launched the project in 2017 and has also had Nina Young, Missy Mazzoli, Tyshawn Sorey, Lisa Bielawa, and Christopher Cerrone create works for it. It's not the first time Koh's shown such initiative, by the way, as indicated by the 2009 launching of her Bach and Beyond project. Like it, this latest one allows for unlimited creative possibilities.

The title of Iyer's six-part concerto stems from words spoken by the late Congressman John Lewis, who, reflecting on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, said, “I got in trouble. It was good trouble. It was necessary trouble.” Taking inspiration from Lewis's message, Iyer crafted a work that's also a response to a miscarriage of justice, the death of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man killed in a racially motivated assault in Detroit in 1982. While the concerto developed in response to anti-Asian prejudice, it speaks to the tragedy of racial hate in general. Bryan's Syzygy is an entirely different animal, hers inspired by the visual artists Alma Thomas (1891–1978), Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Maya Lin (b. 1959). Both concertos are, formally speaking, classical, but other genres seep into them at strategic points, be it jazz, blues, or gospel. In that regard, they're microcosms of the culturally rich country where they were created.

While Koh's given the greatest possible latitude to the composers contributing to the project, she has asked them to question some of the long-held assumptions about the concerto form. Should the soloist, she wondered, still be treated as the heroic figure leading the orchestra as it was during the Romantic era or should that model now be different? How should a modern-day concerto deal with issues of community and the tensions that accrue when people with vastly different backgrounds and beliefs live together? Such issues add to the fertile creative ground within which each composer's working.

Scored for violin and chamber orchestra, Trouble presents Iyer's very personal response to Koh in his decision to eschew the standard concerto whereby a soloist towers majestically over the orchestra for one that treats the figure as an inextricable member of a community. That it's different is immediately apparent when it begins not with a boisterous allegro but with the vulnerable “Prelude: Erasure” and its eerie entwining of desolate flute and violin harmonics. Switching gears dramatically for the next movement, two-note ostinato figures oscillate relentlessly between soloist and orchestra to power “Normale” with Glass-like drive. As intimated by its title, the third part, ”For Vincent Chin,” is the work's centrepiece. Elegiac and haunting, the movement's permeated by sadness as it honours the man's memory with dignity and affection. Restless by comparison is “Cozening,” which dances animatedly and finds Koh double-stopping liberally alongside a jittery pulse. The penultimate “Interlude: Accretion” exudes a ponderous, rather Copland-esque chorale character before animation returns for the twelve-minute finale “Assembly,” panoramic in its scope and hyper-intense in its delivery. With each part staking out its own distinct territory, Iyer covers a vast amount of ground over the course of its half-hour journey.

As engaging as Iyer's concerto is, the one by Bryan's more moving, its final two movements in particular. Following upon a title that refers to the configuration of three celestial bodies during a solar or lunar eclipse, Syzygy explores myriad manifestations of the eclipse in building on the characteristics associated with a work by each artist. Koh's violin acts as the connecting thread that unites the three parts, naturally. “Alma Thomas: The Eclipse” opens the work ethereally with whisper-thin violin figures gliding high overhead and woodwinds and strings fluttering alongside. At the work's centre, serenity and warmth imbue “Frida Kahlo: Tree of Hope, Keep Firm” with enrapturing beauty and time-suspending allure; Koh's at her expressive best here, her playing mesmerizing, poetic, and poised. Darker hues announce the onset of the closing “Maya Ying Lin: Eclipsed Time” movement, but plaintive violin gestures quickly change the tone to one of tender lyricism. Bryan's setting leaves an impression that extends far beyond its eighteen minutes.

October 2026