Reviewer: Jerry
Dubins
My first mistake was in
assuming that the Kuusisto playing the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for
Unaccompanied Violin on the present BIS set was the same Kuusisto whose 1996
Ondine recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto I have in my collection and
have long admired. Not so. My Sibelius Kuusisto is Pekka. The Kuusisto of
these Bach performances is Jaako. Are they related, or is Kuusisto as common
a surname in Finland as Smith is in America? I don’t know. Jaako was born in
1974, Pekka in 1976, so I suppose they could be brothers or paternal
cousins. Pekka is primarily a violinist. Jaako, as the present album
attests, is also a violinist, but is probably better known as a conductor
and composer.
My second mistake was
listening to Jaako’s Bach twice. The first time through, I will admit, I was
gobsmacked by Jaako’s phenomenal technique. The ease with which he sailed
through the rough seas of double-stops and chords, the smoothness and beauty
of his tone—on a 1702 Mateo Gofriller violin with modern setup, I might
add—the accuracy of his intonation, and the propulsive energy of his playing
all initially had me convinced that here was a set of Bach’s Sonatas and
Partitas to vie against the best of the best by the greatest players past or
present.
Then I listened to Kuusisto’s Bach a second time, and I began to realize
that I had allowed myself to be seduced by the violinist’s technical
brilliance and wizardry rather than by any particular interpretive vision,
emotional conviction, or spiritual connection he had to the music. I found
myself echoing Harry Townsend’s review of Shlomo Mintz’s Bach in 9:1, in
which he felt the violinist was “more focused on playing the violin than on
playing Bach.”
I couldn’t help but wonder, when did the fast-paced movements of
these Sonatas and Partitas become contests in velocity to see not just who
could play them the fastest, but what the finite limits of “fast” were? It
wasn’t that long ago—in 39:2, to be precise—that I reviewed Gil Shaham’s
Bach, and was flabbergasted and flummoxed in equal measure by how such an
esteemed violinist could have transformed the music into such a cartoonish
caricature of itself with tempos so fast that it was as if he had set his
metronome to its maximum speed and then dared himself to beat it. His
Chaconne from the D-Minor Partita, at 11:04, was the fastest I had ever
encountered.
Kuusisto’s Chaconne is a more reasonable 13:22, about on a par with Arthur
Grumiaux and Christian Tetzlaff, but it’s Kuusisto’s fast movements that are
off the charts. Articulation, which is largely a function of finger to bow
coordination, is maintained, in itself a minor miracle, but what suffers is
inflection, which is largely a function of the player’s ability to shade or
modulate his tone and to shape the line into distinct, communicative
phrases.
Let me give a couple of examples of what I’m talking about. Bach’s phrase
construction often exhibits a reciprocity in which a given pattern of notes
appears, and is then echoed or mirrored, but not until a bar or two later,
so that the ear has to make the connection. A case in point is the first
Double movement in the Partita No. 1 in B Minor. On the last beat of bar 19,
you have a wide string-crossing figure, from F# up an octave and a third to
A, then dipping down an octave and a fourth to E, and then up again an
octave and a third from the E to G. It’s a very striking gesture, but one
that somehow wants a complementary gesture to balance and complete it. The
corresponding gesture comes, but not until the end of bar 20, where the
string crossings go from D up an octave and a third to F#, down an octave
and fourth to C#, and then up an octave and a third, from the C# to E. The
player needs to inflect these seesawing pivots in a way that the listener is
made aware of how they interlock.
Now, this is one of the movements in which Kuusisto is definitely not fast.
But for all of his diminuendos, crescendos, slight tenutos and accelerandos—all
attempts at expressive phrasing—it’s as if he doesn’t really get how the
pieces of the puzzle fit together, and the result is a picture that doesn’t
make sense. He makes all of the right gestures, but they’re in the wrong
places and their timing is off. So, what we hear—or what I hear—are running
sequences of notes, beautifully played, but unorganized into a coherent,
meaningful shape.
The concluding movement of the Sonata No. 1 in G Minor is an
example of how and where Kuusisto misses the mark in a fast movement. I
don’t know if Bach himself marked the tempo Presto, but it’s what is
given in the Urtext, and it’s what has stuck. This is one of those movements
in which Kuusisto breaks the speed barrier, and in so doing, loses the
ability to juxtapose the shifting groupings of running 16th notes that Bach
cleverly rearranges to make us question the meter.
The movement is in 3/8 time,
but the ways in which the six 16th notes in each bar are grouped—sometimes
in two groups of threes slurred together; other times in three groups of
twos slurred together; and still other times each note bowed
separately—leaves us wondering whether the measure is in one beat (six 16ths
in a single beat), two beats (two pairs of triplets per bar), or three beats
(three pairs of 16th notes slurred in twos). It gets even crazier when six
16ths are slurred, but beginning on the second 16th of a bar, so that the
last 16th is slurred across the bar line to become the downbeat of the next
bar. I’m sure Bach had a lot of fun with this, but at Kuusisto’s
speed-of-light tempo, much of the rhythmic game of “gotcha” goes by the
boards.
Now, let me back up, for I would not want my critique of Jaako Kuusisto’s
readings to leave the reader with a wholly negative impression.
The issues described above relate
specifically and exclusively to matters of interpretation. As pure violin
playing goes, Kuusisto’s performances are nothing short of amazing. His
technical execution is among the best I’ve ever heard, and for that alone,
anyone interested in these works needs to experience Kuusisto’s Bach for a
trip to the realm of the impossible made possible.
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