Mark Swed's Joyous Writing about Music

       When a great music critic gets turned on, he or she can be as artistic a writer as any wielder of prose around.  I submit this paragraph from Mark Swed last week, written of young violinist Jennifer Koh, Chicago born of Asian background:

        "Her tone is big, bold and drop-dead gorgeous, just the thing for Romantic-era repertory.... Less than three years ago, she appeared at the Cerritos Center with the Moscow State Symphony as soloist in the soupy Bruch Violin Concerto.  A blindfolded listener could have been fooled into thinking that an American woman of Korean heritage in her early 30s was, in fact, a burly old-school Russian virtuoso in rumpled suit specked with dandruff reaching into the throbbing depths of a passionate, vodka-besotted soul."