Midori performing Bach

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 was able to take up the post of violinist in the cappella of the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar. The composer’s works for violin make such full and brilliant use of the instrument’s expressive, acoustic and technical possibilities that this may only be explained by Bach’s exceptional talent as a violinist himself.
The majority of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works for violin were written in his Köthen period (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 the violin here acts as a “super-instrument”, the task of which is to embody the composer’s idea regardless of the incredible technical difficulties, 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.
The culmination of the complete cycle, of course, is the Chaconne from the Second Partita. Each variation (there are a total of thirty-two) is like a slide or a stained-glass window depicting some event from the life of Christ. The alpha and the omega of the entire work, however, is its main theme, the ponderous and increasing “tread” against the background of the descending bass, like steps towards Calvary, towards death, towards Hell and resurrection, and the broken chords like the life of a just man carrying the sins of others.
Svetlana Nikitina