Bach Sonatas Partitas Enes

Bach’s remarkable Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are revered for their boundless inventiveness, technical ingenuity and emotional depth. With their brilliant preludes, stately dances and complex four-part fugues, the demands on the performer are enormous – from rapid scale passages, double stopping and arpeggios, to the skill and concentration required to create the illusion of separately moving and interweaving voices.

The violinist Leila Schayegh has already impressively demonstrated her Bach expertise several years ago with her recording of the Sonatas BWV 1014-1019, which won the Diapason dor de lanne, the Editors Choice and was also included in the prestigious Bestenliste der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. Now she is venturing into Bachs Sei solo, better known as Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, the monumental BWV 1001-1006 this is THE solo benchmark violin music which is a must for every violinist, whether or not they specialize in historical performance practice. Here again, her approach and technical perfection are an impressive proof of Bachs Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin by no means having been exhausted, yet, as new brilliant performers such as her will always shed new light on these wonderful pieces.

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.

This program with works for baroque violin reveals Bach as the unique composer he was but also as an accomplished and fastidious craftsman, with an acute sense of effective color and an ability to blend stylistically divergent features into a fluent and satisfying whole. The performances by Boris Begelman are characteristically energetic and stylish. The works are played on a violin by Louis Moitessier from the 1790s. Boris Begelman is the concert master of the recently founded orchestra Amici Veneziani. This group was founded by soprano Simone Kermes and combines the best musicians she has worked with during the last five years.

The sonatas and partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001–1006) are a set of six works composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. They are sometimes referred to in English as the sonatas and partias for solo violin in accordance with Bach's headings in the autograph manuscript: "Partia" (plural "Partien") was commonly used in German-speaking regions during Bach's time, whereas the Italian "partita" was introduced to this set in the 1879 Bach Gesellschaft edition, having become standard by that time. The set consists of three sonatas da chiesa in four movements and three partitas (or partias) in dance-form movements.

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’.

Hitherto we have heard Rachel Podger only in early chamber works and as Andrew Manze's partner in Bach double concertos: here now, at last, is an opportunity to hear her on her own. And you couldn't be more on your own than in Bach's mercilessly revealing Solo Sonatas and Partitas, perhaps the ultimate test of technical mastery, expressiveness, structural phrasing and deep musical perception for a violinist. Playing a Baroque instrument, Podger challenges comparison with the much praised and individual reading by Monica Huggett: she has many of the same virtues – flawless intonation, warm tone, expressive nuances, clear understanding of the proper balance of internal strands – but her approach is sometimes markedly different.