A journey through inner worlds of Bach
ROCKPORT — “Sei Solo a Violino senza Basso accompagnato.” So goes the official title Bach gave his sonically austere, spiritually majestic set of six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. Its first two words, “Sei Solo,” are typically translated as “Six Solos.” The violinist Christian Tetzlaff, however, has a different theory. When I interviewed him for a magazine profile a decade ago, he pointed out that the Italian plural for “solo” should really be “soli.” Could Bach have made such a grammatical blunder in the title of his set? Not a chance, Tetzlaff believes. He prefers the notion of a second underlying meaning: “Sei Solo” may also be translated as “You are alone.”
This is a beautiful, mystical insight. It’s also vintage Tetzlaff, an artist known for probing beneath the surface of familiar scores to deliver prism-shifting interpretations, and a musician inclined to hear Bach’s music not as a decorative adornment of daily life but as a window onto interior worlds of the spirit. He also happens to be one of the most compelling
Bach interpreters before the public today.
This is not by accident. At different points in their careers, many violin soloists take up a Bach project of some sort, devoting themselves to the Sonatas and Partitas for a discreet period, touring them around, making a recording, and then returning to the Tchaikovsky Concerto. Tetzlaff by contrast has placed this particular repertoire, Bach’s studies in solitude, at the center of his own musical universe, recording them at least three times and performing them season after season. On Sunday night, he brought four of the six works to Rockport’s Shalin Liu Performance Center, playing them for a sold-out crowd that likely will not be forgetting this concert anytime soon.
The program’s first half featured two of the minor key works, the Sonata No. 2 and the Partita No. 2, and its second half was devoted to works in major keys, the Sonata No. 3 and Partita No. 3. In this way, Tetzlaff set up the afternoon’s journey as a movement from darkness toward light.
Within each work, however, Bach of course introduces an infinite variety of expressive shadings, a kind of chiaroscuro of the inner life. From the outset, Tetzlaff leaned into these inward-facing aspects of the music. Standing alone on an empty stage, eyes closed, he carried the audience with him movement after movement, playing with a sense of deep interiority and a kind of radical openness. He has spoken of stripping away the protective armor of the self in performance. He seemed to do so once more on Sunday.
Interpretively, Tetzlaff ’s Bach has evolved over the years while remaining the same at its core: pristine, anti-monumental, attuned to the rhythms of dance. Vibrato is still very selectively applied, and he now uses an even wider palette of colors. On Sunday the music’s bass lines, as in the recurring heartbeat-like pulse of the Second Sonata’s Andante movement, were often given slightly more weight. The E major Preludio still burst with radiance. The Largo of the C major Sonata still spoke with a hushed, consolatory beauty.
In any performance of Bach’s cycle, the Chaconne movement of the Partita No. 2 — the artistic Everest of the solo violin repertoire — occupies a special place. Sunday’s performance was particularly moving. Some of the same passages that, in his first recording from 1994, Tetzlaff had played with a clear ringing tone, he now floated with a more airy, dematerialized sound. It was as if the music had abandoned its prior pretense to solidity in order to embrace, without illusion, a sense of its own ephemerality, and the fleetingness of life itself. This sublimely sorrowing movement may in fact have a connection to the death of Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara. During Sunday’s performance, I could not help but think of the gifted and poetic pianist Lars Vogt, Tetzlaff ’s closest musical partner, who died suddenly this year at 51.
The hall at Rockport was a perfectly scaled venue for this concert, and its own unique features only added layers of resonance. At the beginning of the program, when the afternoon sun was still strong, the large wooden doors at the back of the stage were closed, covering that enormous wall of glass looking out onto the sea. But for the remainder of the program they remained open and, as we all listened together, the light slowly faded from the sky.
And here of course lies the paradox of Tetzlaff ’s Sei Solo. This solitary music, which the violinist sees as Bach’s “personal prayer book,” brims with compassion. Tetzlaff describes its performance as a moment of communion. In being alone, the music tells us, you are not alone.
As if in sympathy with his insight, the darkness on Sunday evening eventually turned the glass behind the stage reflective, and, as he played, Tetzlaff ’s own figure rose up to dance and sway in its mirror. The glass also showed the reflected outline of a few listeners. The music held the image of us all.