Tour de force
Few violinists take on the challenge of performing all the sonatas and partitas for solo violin in a single concert. Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman did just that over two evenings, December 3rd and 4th, in the Kraakhuis of De Bijloke in Ghent. Spending several hours alone with the violin in front of an audience—quite the undertaking. A true tour de force.
Liza Ferschtman is particularly well-known in the Netherlands and has also achieved international success. Born in 1979 to Russian parents, she received her first violin lessons from Philippe Hirschhorn at age five. You may remember her from the 2005 Elisabeth Competition, when she reached the semi-finals and, according to some, was unjustly not selected for the finals. With this complete Bach sonatas and partitas cycle, Ferschtman is not breaking new ground—she's performed it several times in recent years.
Bible
How do you play Bach's sonatas and partitas? With a baroque violin and bow, according to baroque performance practice?
Bach's sonatas and partitas are the bible for every violinist, along with Paganini's caprices and Eugène Ysaÿe's solo sonatas. They've been recorded by great twentieth-century violinists, often in the Romantic tradition, with vibrato, heavy accents, dramatic phrasing, and energetic bowing. In recent decades, however, baroque performance practice has increasingly influenced these interpretations. Sigiswald Kuijken, of course, is well-known to us as one of the pioneers of this approach. His performance sounds completely different—much lighter, airier, with a different violin tone and listening experience entirely.
These days, it's unthinkable to play Bach's solo violin works the way musicians did half a century ago. Ferschtman has understood this too. She plays with a modern violin complete with chin and shoulder rest, but uses a baroque bow. It's somewhat lighter and maintains more tension along its entire length. She also plays in baroque pitch, with a slightly lower tuning of the A. She phrases and shapes the music in a hybrid manner, drawing from the Romantic tradition while combining it with a baroque approach. A nice detail: she performs with the score on an iPad. No printed sheet music, but a facsimile of Bach's eighteenth-century manuscript on a twenty-first-century screen...
Vigor and intensity
Bach wrote this work over three hundred years ago. We have only his score. We don't really know how it must have sounded then. We can never undo those three hundred years by trying to perform the music as it was done back then. However you play it, what matters is the expression, the dynamics, the vigor, the intensity. And Ferschtman has succeeded wonderfully at this, in the intimate setting of the Kraakhuis. In her own way, through a blend of different performance traditions.
A quick gigue, a slow sarabande, a stately courante, the fugues from the sonatas... For two evenings, Ferschtman held the audience in her grip. At times playful and dancing, sometimes whispering softly, then pleading and yearning, then again with the grandest sonority as in the famous Chaconne from the second partita, with which she closed the second evening. The standing ovation testified to how she had convinced and inspired the audience.
When we reflect on performance practice, there is at least one thing we know for certain. However music was played back then, people listened differently three hundred years ago than they do today. The sonatas and partitas were not written to be performed at a public recital, with a few hundred paying listeners sitting in absolute silence for hours. Alongside baroque performance practice, no baroque listening practice has emerged in recent decades. Bach in the concert hall—that's a practice that only developed in the Romantic era. Playing Bach in a Romantic manner is therefore just as defensible as baroque performance practice.
