Bartók & Bach: Sonata for Solo Violin, Fantaisie & Fugue, Suite

Album review

As performers have rediscovered the discourse of the traveling virtuoso, transcriptions of all kinds have come back into vogue. Albanian-French violinist Tedi Papavrami here essays a rather extreme program that's Romantic in its way of thinking despite the presence of Bartók's Sonata for solo violin, which is not a transcription. In its way, despite the oddities, the program is very Eastern European and not dissimilar in concept to what a Polish virtuoso of 100 years ago might have attempted: a contemporary folk-based work is paired with paraphrases. True, in this case the paraphrases are rather unlikely. The Bach Fantasia and Fugue for organ, BWV 542, is shoehorned with difficulty into a solo violin setting, and the Suite for keyboard, BWV 822, though less polyphonically oriented to begin with, turns out even more heavily encrusted with double stops. You have to sort of suspend disbelief, but that's the idea. The atmosphere is amped up with heated close-up miking, quotes from puzzling German poems in the packaging, and a booklet note that ranges from Baudelaire to Stalinist cultural decrees to the ethnic segregration of French suburbs. It's a wild ride, fresh, and quite compelling.

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