Bach & Beyond, Pt. 3

Album review

Violinist Jennifer Koh's Bach & Beyond series began in 2012 and concludes in 2020 with this release, the third volume. All have featured a pair of Bach works for unaccompanied violin bookending contemporary solo violin pieces, this time by Luciano Berio (the Sequenza No. VIII, not No. VII as some resources list it) and John Harbison. Even before Bach's time, music for violin solo had the flavor of an esoteric tradition, one that combined a cloistered kind of virtuosity with an aesthetic suggesting deep musical secrets. Bach's solo violin pieces have been interpreted as carrying numerological keys, and one does not have to accept this idea to feel that they respond best to the deliberate, meditative approach Koh brings to them. Her Bach playing suggests periods of deep thought about the music. Koh's pairings here are once again intelligent, placing contemporary works into the Bachian tradition. One might object that Harbison's For Violin Alone, a very Bach-like suite of dances, belonged on one of the earlier albums, which featured unaccompanied Bach partitas rather than the pair of sonatas heard here, but this is a minor and debatable issue. The Berio reflects Bach in its tight weaving of intricate structure and extended technique. By the standards of Bach's own time, he was using extended technique himself. Koh's series is highly recommended to those in search of an experience that will reward repeated hearings.
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