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Johann Sebastian Bach - Sigiswald Kuijken - Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin
2xCD | EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 717 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Deutsche Harmonia Mundi # GD 77043 | Country/Year: Germany 1988, 1981
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque

Sigiswald Kuijken has been a pioneer in performing and teaching Baroque violin technique. He and his brothers were all exposed to early instruments as youngsters. Sigiswald and Wieland intuitively taught themselves how to play the viola da gamba. Sigiswald studied violin at the conservatory in Bruges, then in Brussels with Maurice Raskin, earning his degree in 1964. After doing his own research into Baroque performance practice, Kuijken began playing Baroque works on the violin without using a chinrest or shoulder rest and, in fact, not using his chin at all to hold the instrument…

Although Nathan Milstein hailed from Odessa, the cradle of Russian violin playing, his personal style was more classical and intellectual in approach than many of his colleagues. By the middle of the twentieth century he had become one of the most renowned violinists in the world, and he did as much as anyone else to imbue Bach's solo violin partitas and sonatas with the rather mystical aura they have presently. Milstein began to study violin at the age of seven. His first teacher was Pyotr Stolyarsky, who remained with him through 1914. Milstein's last recital as a Stolyarsky pupil included another promising student, the five-year-old David Oistrakh. Milstein then went to the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study with Leopold Auer.

Although Nathan Milstein hailed from Odessa, the cradle of Russian violin playing, his personal style was more classical and intellectual in approach than many of his colleagues. By the middle of the twentieth century he had become one of the most renowned violinists in the world, and he did as much as anyone else to imbue Bach's solo violin partitas and sonatas with the rather mystical aura they have presently. Milstein began to study violin at the age of seven. His first teacher was Pyotr Stolyarsky, who remained with him through 1914. Milstein's last recital as a Stolyarsky pupil included another promising student, the five-year-old David Oistrakh. Milstein then went to the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study with Leopold Auer.

“Recording Bach’s complete Six Sonatas and Partitas has long been a dream of mine,” says Augustin Hadelich “They are formidable tests of technical ability and stamina, but also of musical imagination and expressive range – they never cease to provide challenges, hope, and joy.” For his interpretation, sensitive to historical practice, Hadelich chose to use a baroque bow. “It was a revelation,” he says. “It felt liberating… Passages of three- and four-note chords felt more fluid .. The dance movements danced more and the slow movements sang more.”

‘One does not create by adding, but by subtracting’, said the film director Robert Bresson, quoted by Jacques Drillon in the booklet that accompanies this new recording of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin by Tedi Papavrami, seventeen years after a first version that already made quite an impact on the discography. Tedi Papavrami decided to start working on them again when he was in lockdown, and these pieces – which, in truth, he had never stopped playing – gave him new sensations: ‘something more alive, more sparkling appeared to me’…