This was one of those rare, fantastic evenings that almost beggar description. There's little in the entire musical repertoire to compare to Bach's works for solo violin - strange pieces, by turns aphoristic and grand, that balance extreme emotion with exquisite poise and push instrument and performer to the edge of their capabilities. In Viktoria Mullova - whose technical perfection combines with matchless, uncompromising interpretative subtlety - they find perhaps their ideal interpreter.
I doubt anyone has tackled the mythically unperformable with such power, conviction or supreme success. To hear Mullova play Bach is, simply, one of the greatest things you can experience.
She opened with the E Major Partita, flinging out the swirling arpeggios of its opening prelude with ebullient joy and a seraphic tonal radiance. In the gavotte she was flirtatiously skittish, as if she wished to participate in the dance. Throughout the partita, however, she gradually darkened the tone and in the weird, spectral, second minuet we had a foretaste of the pyrotechnics and intensity to come.
Thereafter she plunged us into deeper territory, the gaunt G Minor Sonata. This is music of terrible austerity. The double stopped chords and curling phrases of the opening adagio have a funerary formality. The fugue, at once elated and exhausting, has a savage ferocity, and technically Mullova was simply staggering here. The lines interwove and overlapped with phenomenal clarity. She saved the most difficult work for last, however. This was the D Minor Partita, which culminates in the famous chaconne. She built towards it with a warmly human allemanda, a deceptively flowing corrente and a terse sarabande. Then off with the chaconne she went, gathering force with each repetition of its harmonic pattern. The stabs on the open A string were like erratic heartbeats. The switch to the major was heart-stopping, and the fluttering arpeggios were like a glimpse of paradise. When it was over, the audience went berserk. No ovation was ever quite so richly deserved.
