Performing all Bach's solo sonatas and partitas in one evening is the endurance test of choice for a certain, cerebral kind of violinist. Isabelle Faust's attempt on violin Everest comes after her award-winning recording, and her approach to this music remains hard to pin down. Playing on gut strings, she uses vibrato so sparingly that it becomes another decoration, like the sweet-sounding trills and twiddles with which she seasons some of the lighter movements; yet despite these nods to historical authenticity, her Bach has a modern sensibility. This didn't feel like a "period" performance.
Nor did it feel like a Bach marathon: it was more a concert of six distinct works in which all happened to be by the same composer. So whereas the Sonata No 1 flowed with an almost easy gracefulness, the first partita had a touch of impatience that made it sound subtly yet entirely different.
The "doubles" that come after each of the four main movements of that partita found Faust experimenting with different, softer timbres; one of them, played with the bow further than usual from the bridge of the violin, could almost have been coming from underwater. Faust has pointed out that we are not sure whether Bach ever intended these works to be played in front of an audience, and these movements seemed private indeed.
The Partita No 3 was a series of buoyant dances. The weightier Sonata No 3, in contrast, found Faust tending to linger, and the thickly woven opening adagio threatened to grind to a halt; this was perhaps her one misjudgment all evening.
She ended with the Partita No 2, having presumably broken the numerical order so she could close with the great D minor Chaconne. Beautifully, searchingly played, the Chaconne was no anticlimax, but it wasn't quite the big finish we might have expected. Still, perhaps that was the point: it didn't eclipse the variety and beauty of what had gone before, but added to it instead.
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