I've been to concerts to hear Bach's solo Violin Concerti from Anne Akiko Meyers, and Nadja Solerno-Sonnenberg...and had recordings here and there...all amazing...especially live and it seems it would be very difficult to screw up these works, but a great violinist creates the illusion these works are effortless...and the disk above is no exception. And lets not forget the atmospheric and wonderful string section of St. Martin in the Fields backing up Ms. Fischer on this recording.
Just hearing this CD for the first time tonight...yes, I'm squarely in the Bach mood here for whatever reason...perhaps a yearning for the colder Minnesotan winters that are only a illusion of a previous life now it seems...
I have a tendency to take Bach for granted and let him sit on my shelf here, and forget what power his music becomes unleashed if I just take the chance. The solo violin concerti are two separate journeys through one universe, like two different lifetimes and how I could forget these works for a couple of years now leaves me puzzled, except perhaps the reality I didn't have the maturity to stay with them, and hopefully I'm a little more understanding to embrace them with more certainity. Perhaps a year of graveyard shifts is the only thing that could've brought me back to all of Bach's violin concerti as presented here on this disk.
My first musical education was learning the violin from my Grandfather, so perhaps he's in there somewhere in these sounds as I listen again, back at his farm within a harsh Minnesotan winter, surrounded by Bach's Lutheran kin throughout the small farming communites where I traveled to visit my grandfather to learn violin.
Fischer plans her playing very straightforwardly, but her tone is luminous and her pacing effortless, a perfect combination for Bach's constructions here. Bach only used strings for the accompaniments and the texture St. Martin in the Fields achieves here is the sound equivelant of Stradivari's varnish; velvety plush and light, not too dark, with just enough transparency to let the sun shine though on a cloudy fall morning.
A nice surprise was the Concerti for two violins in D minor, which I didn't realize I had heard before, perhaps in a Woody Allen film somewhere I just can't remember, but yet that too brings me back to my youth where I constantly watched Anne Hall while it snowed outside.
Yep, hard to separate memory and music, but thats why it's so enchanting too.
Topic: OT: Bach Violin Concerti/Fischer/Academy of St. martin in the Fields (Read 4902 times)