Taking Ottawa audiences on ‘a very clear journey’
Christian Tetzlaff brings his passion for violin to the perfection of Bach’s music
Christian Tetzlaff says that when he was growing up in Hamburg, Germany, the sound of music around the house was “part of the normal surroundings — like food.”
The son of amateur musicians and choir singers. Tetzlaff began playing recorder when he was four. A few years later, he took up the piano and violin. During his childhood, Bach’s music was “always a good background noise,” Tetzlaff says.
Now 51 and Berlin-based, Tetzlaff grew to become a much-soughtafter and also Grammy-nominated violinist who frequently performs as a soloist with leading North
American and European orchestras. He last performed in Ottawa in 2008 when he was the soloist featured at a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert at the National Arts Centre.
But when Tetzlaff returns to Ottawa on Thursday, April 12, he will perform alone on the stage at Dominion-Chalmers United Church, focusing on four works by Bach, the unsurpassed composer for whom his appreciation has deepened considerably.
In a word, Tetzlaff calls the music that he will play in Ottawa “perfect.” He explains that Bach was a very good violinist and “every solution in every bar is just the perfect solution, violin-wise. It’s quite unbelievable to work through them. It’s the best, economical violin writing with the most effect that you can produce.”
Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin is a set of six long works, each of several movements and set in a different key. Together they form “a very clear journey,” moving from darker works in minor keys to culminate in the Par- tita in E major, “which is the most luminous tonality on the fiddle, rising up to the light,” Tetzlaff says.
In Ottawa, Tetzlaff will play the set’s final four works. “It still gives us the clash of the two big minor pieces and the joyful major pieces, so the core of the cycle is preserved,” he says.
Tetzlaff has released two recordings of the sonatas and partitas, first in 2007 and then again last year. Of the 2017 recording on the Ondine label, Gramophone maga- zine’s reviewer Rob Cowan said: “Everything spells the skill of a master violinist on a roll.”
Tetzlaff says he relishes the opportunity to perform solo. “I talk directly to the people, there is no diversion on stage, it is a totally intimate, almost a one-to-one situation,” he says. “The music is also a feeling of confession, talking about the deepest feelings in a very naïve and simple way.”