Bach Solo Violin Works – Hilary Hahn

There is a moment in the fugue of the Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005, where the four-voice counterpoint has to sound like more than one instrument is up there. Most violinists give it away — you hear the seams, the little scramble of the bow finding its next plane of string. Hilary Hahn doesn’t give it away. She lets the architecture speak and gets out of its path. That, more than anything on this disc, is what convinced me she understood something a great many older and more famous names have not.

I came to this disc wary. Decades of sitting through unaccompanied Bach played as either gymnastic display or musicological penance will do that to a critic. The literature is full of ghosts: Menuhin’s wartime recordings, wonderful and flawed in equal measure; Milstein, elegant to a fault; the gut-string absolutists who seem to think intonation is optional if the bow is old enough. Hahn, barely into her twenties when she made this record, seems to have skipped the anxiety altogether.

Her sound is lean, focused, almost vibrato-shy in places. Never dry, though. The double- and triple-stops ring cleanly throughout, no scrubbing, no grinding for volume. She has a way of leaning into a suspension and releasing it so the harmonic tension just… dissolves, rather than resolves with a thump.

The Partita opens with the kind of clean-limbed Preludio that can sound merely brisk in lesser hands. Not here. There’s dance in it. You can practically hear the gigue-writing DNA that runs through the whole set — the sense that Bach, even alone with a solo fiddle and a page of manuscript, never entirely left the ballroom behind.

What she avoids, and this matters, is fussiness. No mannered hesitations before ornaments, no little conductorial nod to say “here comes a trill, please admire it.” The trills simply happen, woven into the line’s own logic. Ricci used to do this. So did Grumiaux, in his understated way. It is a rarer quality than you’d think among violinists trained in the HIP-conscious decades after 1980, many of whom seem terrified of playing a phrase without a scholarly alibi.

Is it “authentic”? Wrong question, and always has been. Nobody alive has heard Bach play this music, and the fetish for imagined seventeenth-century bow-arm artistry has produced as much wooden, joyless fiddling as it has revelation. Hahn plays a modern setup, no gut strings, and simply trusts the counterpoint to do its own persuading. It does.

If I have a caveat, and I do, mildly, it’s that a handful of the faster movements could stand a touch more air, more daylight between phrases. She is so intent on forward motion that occasionally the music doesn’t breathe quite as deeply as it might. This is a young player’s virtue shading, just slightly, into a young player’s limitation. Give her twenty years and I suspect this will deepen further; the bones are already extraordinary.

But this is playing of real intelligence and unshowy conviction — a Bach recording that will hold up against Szeryng’s austere authority and Milstein’s silvery poise, and hold its own. Not the last word on this music. Nobody gets the last word on this music. But an arrival worth celebrating, and a disc I’ll return to.