Sergey Khachatryan (violin) and Lusine Khachatryan (piano)

Johann Sebastian Bach’s musical education began when he learnt the violin under his father’s tuition. And although in years to come the young Bach was to spend all of his time studying the organ, composition and choral singing, he had learned the violin so well that at the age of eighteen he had taken the post of violinist in the cappella of the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar. The  instrument’s expressive, acoustic and technical possibilities are used so fully and brilliantly in the composer’s works that it can only be explained by his professional proficiency on the instrument.
The  majority of Bach’s works for violin were written in his Köthen (1717–1723). The Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, completed in 1720, stand apart in the history of music. It is impossible to compare them with anything else. Not because “at times the relatively natural possibilities of the instrument are ignored in them, but because they frequently demand that the violinist be able to resolve extremely complex technical problems” (Leopold Auer); and not because the form of the violin solo sonatas and suites (partite in Italian) allows the instrument to display in full all of its expressive qualities... This music has such philosophical depths, such profound wisdom and even theology that the problem of interpreting it has engaged the minds of performers and music historians for over one hundred years now.
Svetlana Nikitina