She’s not just talking about playing a concerto in front of a 100-piece orchestra. She’s also talking about chamber music. Koh spent the summer of 2005 playing chamber music at Marlboro, and then that fall she formed the Variation String Trio with violist Hsin-Yun Huang and cellist Wilhelmina Smith.

She’s also talking about working with composers living and dead, getting into their heads and hearts through their scores, and developing personal relationships with those who are still alive, notably Higdon and Zorn.

“Jennifer is an unusual case,” says Higdon, “because you can craft absolutely anything and she’ll play it; that’s the kind of thing that composers just dream about. [She] has a range of repertoire that runs the entire gamut of what’s out there, from the simple and elegant to a gnarly complexity that would make your hair stand on end! She does it all and does it very convincingly. So when I was writing String Poetic for her, my main thought was to give her a piece with a series of movements that could be stand-alone works, and to vary the movements in temperament and even musical language. Her playing adjusts beautifully with each character change in the music.

“She’s very smart, and a hard worker. She has a good combination of raw talent and finesse in her playing. When she's playing in a concert, you feel like you're right there experiencing the music with her. There's no sense of a separation between the audience and the performer. It’s truly a shared experience.”

Koh has been praised for her tone, technique, and intonation even when she’s playing thorny new music. A few decades ago, new music often wasn’t played very well. But Koh, like many other new-music advocates today, believes that one must apply the same standards to performance of contemporary music as to Beethoven. “It takes the same amount of concentration and interest,” she asserts. “One of my teachers was Felix Galimir, and he worked closely with Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, and even Ravel. And Szigeti had a close relationship to Bartók. One of the greatest creative processes to be a part of is to work with composers. You have the composer right there to ask any questions you have. Sometimes there are questions about what these markings mean, but what I find so fascinating about it also is that I have a chance to ask them what their inspiration point was for a particular work.

“It’s so fulfilling.”

Koh doesn’t drop names like Galimir and Szigeti lightly; she’s an avid collector of historical recordings. “It’s a personal obsession,” she admits. One of her favorite violinists of the recent past is the Belgian Arthur Grumiaux. “There’s an incredible elegance and incredible purity to his playing that I very much connect to, and an integrity also.”

Koh is proud to play an instrument once owned by Grumiaux (see sidebar, “What Jennifer Koh Plays”).

As impassioned as her own playing can be, her admiration of the suave, patrician Grumiaux shows that she’s not interested in developing a reputation as a firebrand. In fact, she shuns the label virtuoso.

“Being a good musician is, in a lot of ways, more about your ability to listen than using your ability to play,” Koh says. “Being a virtuoso is not the most important aspect of music. I’d just like to think of myself most as a good listener, and as a musician."