Florence Malgoire & Blandine Rannou - Bach: Sonates pour violon oblige et clavecin, BWV 1014-1019 (2019)

This is a highly subjective interpretation of Bach's often-performed set of six sonatas for violin and harpsichord, played on historical instruments. Swiss-based violinist Florence Malgoire renders Bach's violin lines almost without vibrato. Unlike other Baroque violinists who favor this sound, however, she keeps to a delicate attack in place of the usual muscular, meaty bowstrokes. Her phrasing has a sweeping quality that's oddly graceful, but sometimes she begins a phrase so subtly that Blandine Rannou's harpsichord seems to be the lead instrument, with the violin providing an accompaniment like that of an early Classical piano-and-violin sonata. Soon enough the balance shifts, but the effect is hardly idiomatic to Bach. The music always feels alive, however, and Malgoire and Rannou bring out plenty of unexpected details.

Whether or not this unusual approach works may depend on the individual listener, but it also requires the acceptance of a certain way of looking at these sonatas, one laid out in the liner notes by Gilles Cantagrel. He stresses the probable chronological closeness of these sonatas with Bach's six unaccompanied partitas and sonatas for violin, works that fell into a long German virtuoso tradition in which a subjective performance style was entirely appropriate; Bach wrote all these works during the Cöthen portion of his career, the source of most of his instrumental ensemble music. This vision of the violin-and-keyboard sonatas conflicts with the one most listeners instinctively hold; the unaccompanied sonatas are usually thought of as music standing aside from the rest of Bach's output in an exalted realm of their own. In any event, there's a general trend toward sharp, tough performances of Bach's music for strings these days, sculpted as if out of a block of ice, and there's room for an interpretation that brings a light, almost fantastic touch while drawing on the same general ideas. Malgoire and Rannou are not for everybody, and sampling will help you determine whether you might be among those who would find them intriguing. ~ James Manheim