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NEW YORK (August 18, 2026)—Grammy Award-winning violinist Jennifer Koh performs all six of J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, one of the most demanding undertakings in the violin repertoire, at Miller Theatre at Columbia University on Thursday, September 24 at 7:00 p.m.
Spanning nearly three hours, Bach’s complete Sonatas and Partitas demand extraordinary physical stamina, technical command, and expressive range. A cornerstone of Koh’s repertoire, the works reveal the full depth of an artistry she has brought to Bach over decades. As The New York Times wrote, “Bach’s monumental set is less a peak to be surmounted than a journey that warrants return excursions and encourages consideration of manifold paths. Jennifer Koh, a superbly gifted violinist, has proved to be a steadfast and sure surveyor of this terrain.”
Koh has returned to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas throughout her career, continually finding new possibilities within the music. The same spirit of curiosity that drives her advocacy for contemporary composers also informs her approach to Bach, allowing these 18th-century works to speak anew to the present.
Koh said, “Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas have long been considered definitive works written for solo violin. These works were never commissioned, nor are they known to have been performed publicly in Bach’s lifetime. I have come to understand them as an intensely personal and intimate musical journal that Bach was compelled to write over seventeen years, simply out of a pure need to create. They are a musical expression of his life, his birth, and development as an artist.”
In addition to performing Bach’s complete Sonatas and Partitas at Miller Theatre, Koh’s 2026–27 season includes Barber’s Violin Concerto with the Greater Bridgeport and Phoenix Symphonies and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with the New World Symphony. She joins pianist-composer Vijay Iyer for music from their new project, Scenes of Living and Dying, at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, later bringing the program to Capital Region Concerts and UCLA’s Nimoy Theater. She also performs the world premiere of Dai-Keong Lee’s Violin Concerto, reconstructed from the composer’s surviving sketches, with the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra.
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