Jennifer Koh, violin & Vijay Iyer, piano

Jennifer Koh and Vijay Iyer open the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society's 41st season at the Perelman Theater on Friday, October 16. Koh is on violin and Iyer on piano, and the program puts them side by side for a good part of the night.

The core of the evening is Scenes of Living and Dying, a collection of works Iyer wrote to hold space for private and public grief. Part I gets its Philadelphia premiere here, and Part II gets its world premiere, which PCMS co-commissioned. Koh pairs them with Bach's Partita in D Minor for Solo Violin, so the two composers run in parallel throughout the set. They also play The Diamond, written by Iyer for violin and piano, and some of his solo piano work that's still to be announced. The whole thing is framed as an exploration of the human relationship to the thresholds of life: births, deaths, transformations, and awakenings.

It's a big night for both. Koh is a Grammy Award-winning violinist who also serves as Artistic Director of the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts at the Kennedy Center, where she curated the all-day new-music festival Sounds of US. For Iyer, this is his PCMS debut. He's a composer and pianist whose work The Guardian has called "melodically alluring, rhythmically invigorating, and deviously dazzling," and The New York Times has described him as a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway"—one of the most influential shape-shifting presences in twenty-first-century music.

The concert starts at 7:30 PM at the Perelman Theater in the Kimmel Center, 300 South Broad Street. It runs about an hour and 40 minutes, including intermission, and tickets are $32.