Ysaÿe Six Sonatas For Solo Violin Hillary Hahn

Known for his virtuosity and probing musicianship, violinist James Ehnes has been honored with many international prizes, including a GRAMMY, a Gramophone Award, and eleven JUNO Awards.

Although Viktoria Mullova released a recording of Bach's three partitas for solo violin for Philips in 1994, she never had the opportunity with Philips to record their companion pieces, the three sonatas for solo violin, so this 2009 Onyx recording is Mullova's first complete recording of all six of these milestone works. In the intervening years, the Russian virtuoso has grown as a technician and as an interpreter. Mullova's tone is still large, but she has developed deeper subtlety.

If you adn't noticed, Bach aficionados as a grumpy, contentious lot, and have been long before the period stylists assaulted the city gates with battering rams. In 1981 The Gramophone's reviewer greeted Gidon Kremer's first cycle of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas quite sourly, admiring the brilliant technique but deciding, overall, that the interpretation was wide of Bach's intentions. This strikes me as indefensible.

Fascinating performers and audiences alike with their architectural perfection as well as their emotional range, these are works that lend themselves to very different interpretations, and on this recording it is the Bach of Finnish violinist Jaakko Kuusisto we hear. Himself a composer – as well as violinist and conductor – Kuusisto remembers beginning to study individual movements from the set at the age of ten. The music has been with him ever since, and to him ‘no other works for the violin provide a higher challenge or greater beauty’.

Nathan Milstein plays these magnificent pieces with patrician elegance, easily overcoming their all-but-insurmountable difficulties. His burnished tone has a warmth like that of mahogany, and his fine fingerwork and flawless bowing make for an assured connection of ideas. In the Chaconne to the D minor Partita–which can make even a very good violinist sound overmatched and inept–he zeroes in with the sort of concentration one usually sees in chess champions. Here, as elsewhere in the cycle, Milstein projects not only the music's emotive force, but Bach's grand architecture as well.

Tenenbaum is a very ardent musician whose Bach is irresistibly expressive, overwhelmingly passionate, and unreservedly loving. Tenenbaum has known the Sonatas & Partitas since she was a child and her interpretations are the results of her long and profound intimacy with the music. As in a great marriage, Tenenbaum knows everything there is to know about the Sonatas & Partitas and she knows the music has depths that reveal themselves only when the player surrenders to them.

Tenenbaum is a very ardent musician whose Bach is irresistibly expressive, overwhelmingly passionate, and unreservedly loving. Tenenbaum has known the Sonatas & Partitas since she was a child and her interpretations are the results of her long and profound intimacy with the music. As in a great marriage, Tenenbaum knows everything there is to know about the Sonatas & Partitas and she knows the music has depths that reveal themselves only when the player surrenders to them.

Violinist Vaughan Jones brings us a fascinating collection of 18th century solo works. Three hundred years after their first publication, Austrian composer Johann Joseph Vilsmayr's Six Partitas for Solo Violin are recorded here in their entirety for the first time. Johann Georg Pisendel was a famous Baroque violinist and composer. His fiendishly difficult Violin Sonata is an unpredictable, tempestuous and capricious work, showing great scope and ambition. To round out the recording, Jones plays the famous Passacaglia by Biber - a somber, moving work and a perfect end to this noteworthy set.

Violinist Herwig Zack puts the spotlight on the unaccompanied four strings of his instrument, with J. S. Bach as the foundation, inspiring the 20th century composers Ben-Haim, Berio and Bloch. Violinist Herwig Zack, who produced a compelling and imaginative solo recording with Essentials (AV2155), follows with an equally inspired recital that casts the spotlight on the “4 strings only” of his unaccompanied violin. With J. S. Bach providing the foundations on which arguably all solo violin repertoire was created, Zack places his Second Sonata at the heart of the program and surrounds it with four mid-20th century works which were indelibly inspired by the Baroque master.