The recital of Bach given last night by violinist Viktoria Mullova was not to all tastes. Indeed, at half time, her playing provoked a relaxed, though intense, debate. For some, it was too detached. To others, what we were hearing was "the best in the world".
That's all personal taste. The truth of the reactions provoked by the playing of this unique musician is this. If you prefer your Bach to be delivered heart on sleeve, as unendingly glorious music full of passion and emotion, then Mullova's playing of the unaccompanied Sonata in A minor, the Sonatas in E and A major for violin and harpsichord, and the awesome Chaconne in D minor from the second Partita, probably left you cold, wondering if this woman had any warmth in her soul.
At another extreme, if you prefer Bach's music austere and intellectual, then the sheer variety of tone that Mullova produced from her gut-stringed violin might have seemed cosmetic and irritating.
There's no fixed answer to this conundrum of taste, but my own view is that Mullova finds her way to the soul of the music by a different route, and it's one that eschews any glamorisation of the music.
There can be no debate, however, that her wonderful armoury of techniques, which informed every nuance of her playing, includes a stupendously varied palette of dynamics, colouring, unforced expressiveness and, particularly, articulation, absolutely none of which she used rhetorically.
The results might sound austere and objective, but there is a world of subtlety beneath the surface, which included magical interplay between Mullova and her lucid accompanist, Ottavio Dantone.
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