Listeners' mileage may vary with this release by Swedish violinist Cecilia Zilliacus and vocalist Lena Willemark. Sample one of the tracks containing the latter, perhaps the chorale Wo soll ich fliehen hin : it's a fair bet that you'll either love the voice or be sufficiently put off to forget the whole thing. What you have here is Bach used as a stimulus for further creative activity, plus contemporary works in which Bach's music plays a direct role. As the track list indicates, the performance of the Bach Partita No. 2 ...
Read More
Listeners' mileage may vary with this release by Swedish violinist Cecilia Zilliacus and vocalist Lena Willemark. Sample one of the tracks containing the latter, perhaps the chorale Wo soll ich fliehen hin : it's a fair bet that you'll either love the voice or be sufficiently put off to forget the whole thing. What you have here is Bach used as a stimulus for further creative activity, plus contemporary works in which Bach's music plays a direct role. As the track list indicates, the performance of the Bach Partita No. 2 for solo violin in D minor, BWV 1004, is interspersed with chorale melodies sung by Willemark. This idea is based on the research of German musicologist Helga Thoene, who claims that the sonata contains hidden chorale melodies with a programmatic function: that of memorializing Bach's deceased first wife, Maria Barbara. You might or might not accept this theory: it involves numerological manipulation of the kind that never seems to stick when it comes to Bach. But there's something...
Read Less
