Bach, Beethoven and Wieniawski – Vengerov

Some violinists return from injury and sound chastened. Others sound defiant, as if the body itself were something to be argued with. Vengerov, on the evidence of this disc, sounds like a man still negotiating the terms of the argument.

That shoulder injury cost him years — some of the best years, the ones a string player can least afford to lose, when the callus of technique is still hardening into something like permanent identity. He came back changed. Anyone who heard him in the 1990s, all that unfettered sound and swagger, will notice the difference immediately here, and not entirely to the disc’s advantage.

Take the Bach. The Partita No. 2 in D minor closes with the Chaconne, thirty-two variations on an eight-bar bass that Brahms said could break a man who tried to write anything comparable. Vengerov plays a Baroque bow for portions of the set, an odd choice for someone whose whole musical personality was forged on the modern instrument’s expressive extremities. The result sits uneasily between worlds. Not quite gut-strung austerity, not quite the plush 1970s Bach of Milstein or Grumiaux. The Allemanda plods slightly, weighted down by a kind of ceremonial carefulness. The Sarabanda withdraws into itself — fair enough, that’s a legitimate reading — but the Chaconne, which should accumulate the way a storm accumulates, some cells of energy discharging and others gathering silently for the next assault, instead passes through long stretches that simply evaporate. You wait for the goosebumps. They don’t come.

Compare Viktoria Mullova, another product of the old Soviet pedagogical mill who went searching for historical truth in this same repertoire around the same years. Mullova rebuilt her craft from the ground up: new bow grip, gut strings, the whole apparatus. The tone that emerged is drier, more astringent, entirely purposeful. Vengerov’s tone remains fundamentally the Romantic instrument it always was, softened at the edges, and grafting period mannerisms onto it produces something neither fish nor fowl. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the experiment. I doubt its success.

The Kreutzer Sonata fares better. “Better” here is a relative term.

Golan opens the introduction with weight and gravity. Then Vengerov’s entrance feels oddly unbuttoned, almost too relaxed, as if he’d wandered in from the green room still finishing a sentence. Ideally this sonata detonates. Beethoven wrote it, after all, for George Bridgetower, a virtuoso of terrifying flamboyance, before the famous falling-out over a woman and Beethoven’s spiteful rededication to Kreutzer, who reportedly never even played it. It wants danger, imbalance, the sense that two equal and unpredictable forces are colliding rather than cooperating. Here the first movement’s Presto has moments of real fire, but the phrasing occasionally sounds snatched at, hurried through rather than driven through, and a few pitches land just under the note. Small things. But this is repertoire where small things register like gunshots.

The variations of the second movement occupy a curious middle ground tempo-wise: not the hushed, almost devotional slowness Wolfgang Schneiderhan brought to his disc with Kempff, where every variation seemed suspended in amber, and nothing like the propulsive, almost reckless speed Joseph Fuchs found with Artur Balsam decades ago. Vengerov and Golan split the difference, which is a legitimate interpretive choice but not always a compelling one. Golan, to his credit, is the more consistently alert partner throughout. His voicing in the lower register has real bite, real intention behind it.

The encores tell their own story. Wieniawski’s Scherzo-tarantelle is tossed off with the kind of easy bravura that made Vengerov famous in the first place. This is where the old electricity flickers back to life, fingers flying, bow arm loose and confident. The Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 1, in Joachim’s arrangement, has genuine gypsy snap to it, rubato that breathes rather than lurches. Funny: the lighter fare suits him better right now than the monuments do.

Maybe that’s the honest takeaway. A great violinist rebuilding himself in public, working through repertoire that demands a certainty of address he hasn’t fully recovered, or perhaps has deliberately set aside in favor of something more inward, more skeptical of his old bravado. I respect the impulse. I’m just not sure the Bach or the Beethoven here quite justifies itself against the field: Mullova’s tougher-minded rigor, Grumiaux’s liquid poise, Heifetz’s incandescence in the Kreutzer with Moiseiwitsch. Admirers of Vengerov, and I remain one, will want this disc for what it documents: an artist mid-journey, talented as ever, not yet arrived.