Anyone who listened to Vaughan Jones’s 2014 release, ‘The Hidden
Violin’ (7/14), will know that repertoire rarities don’t always produce a
winner of an album. To say that Jones’s latest two-disc set is a great
deal more rewarding is something of an understatement. Yes, it’s obscure
repertoire once more; but this is music that demands our full
attention, presented in such a manner as to ensure that it gets it.
The main event is the first-ever recording of the complete,
original set of Six Partitas by Johann Joseph Vilsmaÿr, who worked as an
increasingly prominent violinist at the Salzburg court between 1689 and
his death in 1722. His Partitas, which pre-date those of Bach by at
least five years, are challenging polyphonic works, full of double- and
triple-stops, arpeggiated chords and implied conversations between
musical lines. French and Italian influences are audible, as is that of
Austrian folk music, but the take-home point is simply that they’re
intensely beautiful works that constantly tickle the ear with fresh
moods, styles and effects as they dance along. Add the immaculate
technical precision and immense musicality of Jones’s playing (on a
gut-strung modern instrument tuned at A=440kHz and played with a replica
snakewood Baroque bow), set it all within the subtly ample acoustic of
the church of St Mary Magdalene in Willen, Buckinghamshire, and you have
something of a recording triumph which the programme’s other two works
only build upon.
First, Pisendel’s Sonata in A minor. Then, to finish, a story: Biber’s The Guardian Angel Sonata, No 16 from the Mystery Sonatas, played with a purity, profundity and sense of dramatic architecture that truly stops you in your tracks. Really, bravo. (Charlotte Gardner / Gramophone)
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