Violinist Jennifer Koh on Her Decade-Long Struggle With a Rare Neurological Disorder

It began with numbness. The violinist Jennifer Koh was giving a solo recital in Santa Fe 10 years ago when, early in the first piece, she realized she couldn’t feel her right hand.

She got through the performance, thanks to muscle memory. When she returned home to Manhattan from New Mexico, the problem went away after about a week. But the numbness came back three months later, and then nine months after that, lingering for weeks before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived.

What followed was a medical odyssey of misdiagnoses and failed treatments, happening entirely behind the scenes of Koh’s professional life; artists are often secretive about these things in classical music, an industry in which chronic illness or a reputation for unreliability can sink a career. Now, for the first time, Koh is sharing her struggle with a rare neurological condition called Parsonage-Turner syndrome. Many of her friends and colleagues will probably learn about her experience through this story.

Koh is ready to talk mostly because she is on the other side of treatment. As if to prove, to herself as much as anyone, that her bow hand is truly back, she has returned to performing Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas as a single marathon concert. This is the pillar of the violin repertoire, more than two hours of music that artists work on throughout their lives. Next, she is bringing the recital to the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday.

In the years it took to understand and manage her illness, Koh lost her father but found a renewed connection to her family and Korea. With that came answers, solutions and, at last, a recovered joy in performance. She feels like there is a lesson to learn from it all.

“I think this is also about the small actions that people take, that changes people’s lives,” she said. “And about not giving up hope. I was so close to that.”