Star violinist Leonidas Kavakos faced quite a challenge in attempting a recording of Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin. These six pieces have been a kind of rite of career passage (at various career stages) for many violinists, and listeners have all kinds of approaches from which to choose. There are recordings by golden-age violin greats, gutsy (figuratively and literally) historically oriented performances, realizations of numerological and other intellectual theories, and more. Kavakos does well, finding a ...
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Star violinist Leonidas Kavakos faced quite a challenge in attempting a recording of Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin. These six pieces have been a kind of rite of career passage (at various career stages) for many violinists, and listeners have all kinds of approaches from which to choose. There are recordings by golden-age violin greats, gutsy (figuratively and literally) historically oriented performances, realizations of numerological and other intellectual theories, and more. Kavakos does well, finding a kind of middle ground that draws on several traditions. He's not a Baroque violinist, and his approach is basically traditional, with plenty of playing that is expressive in the Romantic way, with variations in tempo (try the fugue from the Violin Sonata No. 2 in C major, BWV 1005) placed in service of interpretive goals. He uses Bach's own title, Sei solo, which is inaccurate Italian (it should be "sei soli" if it is to mean "six solos"), but perhaps, the booklet suggests, is a grim...
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