Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin have inspired divergent interpretations -- perhaps more divergent even than any other Bach works. Some players treat them as mystical, hermetic texts and strive for a kind of severe beauty. For violinists of the Romantic school, by contrast, they were often supremely passionate works, with a full catalog of expressive devices married to the most technically challenging materials. For Baroque violinist
John Holloway, they are something else again: "a compendium of Baroque violin technique [that] is both a challenge and an opportunity."
Holloway's agile readings fall into a group that treats Bach's works as the apex of a series of technical studies that dated well back into the seventeenth century, rather than as strange and isolated works. He makes a strong case for the appropriateness of the Baroque violin in these pieces -- it seems throughout that the music, while certainly difficult, doesn't make him sweat. Passagework runs off the strings in flowing streams. The tough second-movement fugue in the Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005, sounds brisk and clean in its double and triple stops, not -- as they can in lesser hands on a modern violin -- like someone trying to start a lawn mower. And after hearing
Holloway you'll never listen to the massive Chaconne that closes the Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004, in quite the same way again. The sheer difficulty of this movement seems to cause players, especially those who normally traffic in the Romantic classics on a modern violin, to imbue the central shift to D major with a kind of cathartic triumph.
Holloway is considerably more restrained, and the music he makes here doesn't seem quite so extreme; the work as he plays it seems more of a piece with the rest of Bach's output, and that's probably a good thing. ECM recorded the work at the Propstei St. Gerold, an Austrian monastery with live, brilliant sound that's lovely for choral music but a bit lofty and lonesome for violin music intended for the well-upholstered chambers of a noble family.
Holloway's calm application of superior skills to this music, however, comes to seem entirely appropriate as you immerse yourself in his performance.