GREAT RECORDINGS phase 14

BACH: SONATAS & PARTITAS
Itzhak Perlman

4 76808 2
(Angel: 4 76811 2) (2CDs)
Recorded 1986–1987
Stereo/DDD
143 minutes

Back >>

‘Technically Perlman is beyond reproach. There is brilliance in the faster movements, delicacy in the galanteries, and grave expressiveness in the slower music. As the coupling of the names of Bach and Perlman is not one that readily springs to mind, this fine recording has come as a real surprise.’ (Gramophone)

So far, Bach’s unaccompanied violin music has not been represented in the Great Recordings of the Century catalogue. These masterpieces of the repertoire are now added to the series in fine performances recorded in New York by a major EMI artist and one of the great violinists of our times, the Israeli-born American Itzhak Perlman. In his booklet essay for this reissue, Tully Potter writes that Perlman’s readings are ‘characterised by a seamless legato, structural strength, immense breadth and a technique that makes light of the challenge of revealing Bach’s implied counterpoint on an instrument set up in the modern way’.

Writing in 1988 at the time of the first release of these CDs, Perlman himself explained that at the start of the project he was playing his ‘beautiful’ 1740 ‘Ex-Sauret’ Guarneri del Gesù violin but that, as the sessions continued, he was fortunate enough to acquire a famous Stradivarius (the ‘Soil’ of 1714). ‘I could not resist using this magnificent instrument on record at the first opportunity and the C major and A minor Sonatas became that opportunity’.

Bach wrote his six works for solo violin (three sonatas and three suites of dances labelled partitas) during his years in service to the music-loving Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen and it is known that the composer made a fair copy of the complete Sonatas & Partitas in 1720. It is now thought likely that the famous Chaconne (a massive and profound set of variations) with which the second partita ends is a memorial to the composer’s beloved wife Maria Barbara, who died suddenly at Cöthen in 1719.