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GRAMOPHONE (02/2016)
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Supraphon 
SU41862 



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Reviewer: Caroline Gill

From the sound you might expect this performance by the Czech violinist Pavel Šporcl to be a straightforward period-instrument recording. The clear-but-thin early-music tone of his (blue) violin speaks beautifully into the glowing acoustics of the Prague Chapel of the Czech Brethren despite being fundamentally underpowered for these pieces, and all his trademark precision and lightness of touch are on immediate display. But the reading itself is so unmistakably Romantic that instead it creates a perplexing confusion.

It is evident throughout that Šporcl is striving to balance these works’ three most important requirements: variation in tone colour, forward motion and contrapuntal sense. Basic tempi are extremely well judged and controlled, but the pulling about of the phrasing is constantly playing mischief in the background, making it seem so Romantic and micromanaged. When Bach makes the listener work so hard to hear the harmony and its direction, it is vital to have a truly discernible pulse to latch on to. If the Allegro assai of the C major Sonata has a fabulous sense of moto perpetuo and a resulting strong shape and direction, then the movement that follows it, the E major Partita’s Preludio, though of equal speed and purpose, has a pulse that continually drags its feet with over-emphasis. Other movements suffer from similar stalling: the languorous stretching of the broken chords in the Adagio that opens the C major Sonata cuts the music up into single-bar chunks, for instance, and the over-ornamentation of its Fuga hampers any chance of following Bach’s ideas through the movement. The great Chaconne has similar issues – the melody, which should speak directly from the alto line, suddenly disappears after a minute or so, just as it starts to make some progress.

There are some performances that manage to avoid sounding ‘over-managed’ in this way despite a fundamentally similar approach – Christian Tetzlaff’s first version, for instance, or Gil Shaham’s second. But when responding to the minutiae of these works on such a ‘micro’ level there is always a risk that equal attention will not be paid to the ‘macro’. Once that bigger picture is lost, so are the good elements, and the whole begins – regrettably – to grate.

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