You’ve got to love Jennifer Koh for more than just her brain. Oh, sure, at age 17, when she won the top violin prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, she nixed the idea of becoming an instant touring virtuoso and high-tailed it back to Oberlin College to finish her degree—in English literature. And, yes, she had the idea of recording a disc of Szymanowski, Martinü, and Bartók concertos after reading the complete works of Czech novelist and essayist Milan Kundera.

Yet Koh is most certainly not the sort of person to intellectualize all the emotion out of music. Says her mentor, violinist Jaime Laredo, “She’s very outgoing, almost flamboyant, but in a very good way, not in an ostentatious way. And she really touches the heart, because she plays from the heart.”

Koh was born in the Chicago area and pretty much started her career at the top; by age 11 she had already soloed with the Chicago Symphony. In the 1994–95 season alone, she won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the Avery Fisher Career Grant. She got that English-lit degree from Oberlin, along with a performance diploma from Oberlin Conservatory, then for “finishing school” she chose the Curtis Institute of Music, from which she graduated in 2002 as a disciple of Laredo and Felix Galimir.

For the past few years she’s been out on her own, proving that the former child prodigy has become a remarkable adult musician, both thoughtful and vibrant. As a laureate of the Tchaikovsky competition, she’s asked to play the Tchaikovsky concerto a lot, as well as the usual Sibelius and Bruch chestnuts. But her orchestral appearances this season also involve Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade, Kaija Saariaho’s Graal Theatre, György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto with a cadenza she commissioned from John Zorn, and the premiere of a concerto by Charles Wuorinen. Her duo recitals with pianist Reiko Uchida are an unexpected mélange of Schubert, Schumann, Poulenc, Kurtág, and a brand-new sonata by Jennifer Higdon.

Higdon, one of today’s most prominent American composers, teaches at Curtis, and that’s where she first noticed Koh. “I was always impressed by her excitement over new music and her constant curiosity about what's being written now,” says Higdon.

“Jennifer is an impeccable musician, with incredible energy in her playing, and a real sensitivity to whatever style she is playing in. I love her open sense of handling everything from an atonal work, to the most lush romantic piece, to a jazz-based piece; there’s real skill there and the pieces all sound like they fit perfectly in the world in which they’ve been written.

“She is dedicated to giving her all in both old works and new.”

Perhaps Koh’s flair for so many different kinds of music is related to her own intellectual eclecticism. As a child and college student, she didn’t just lock herself in a closet and do music, music, music. She says getting a degree in literature is one of the best things she ever did as a developing violinist.

“Musicians find their points of inspiration in different places. For me one of those points of inspiration comes from literature and poetry,” she says. “It is very relevant to me still, in a lot of the ways I program recitals and CDs. The Portraits CD (with the Szymanowski, Martinü, and Bartók) was inspired by going through a huge phase of reading all of Milan Kundera’s translated works in English. He writes so beautifully about music; very often music is a metaphor for life in his writing, which is also true in my own life. He speaks a lot about Janác?ek and other composers from that region of Bohemia, and it became the starting point for thinking about this CD.”

This kind of thinking is nothing new for Koh.

Says Laredo, “Teaching Jennifer was a pure joy. She was so curious; she wanted to learn so much. She couldn’t get enough. She was hungry all the time. She wasn’t interested in just playing the fiddle. Her interests ran the gamut from Bach to John Adams. She was a fast learner, and now she has this incredible career.

“I’m so proud of her I can’t tell you.”

Before signing up with Laredo at Curtis, Koh pursued the literature degree, she says, because “it was important to expand my range of knowledge. One of the things I’ve always believed is that your art form is a reflection of who you are and your interests. I was very drawn to literature and especially poetry from the very beginning. Poetry is very close to music in the sense of how a writer decides to choose a comma or a semicolon or a break in the line. Everything in poetry means something more, in the sense that each word represents something more, metaphorically, than what it literally is.

“In a piece of music, each note by itself has very little meaning, but if you listen to an A major chord, it’s all about the relation between the notes. And as a musical line develops, it’s the relations between the notes and the time between the notes, the commas and semicolons, that give them meaning. That’s what I love so much about being a musician: You’re part of something so much greater than yourself, and the experience is so much greater than yourself alone.”