Bach Sonatas and Partitas – Gottfried Schneider

Every violinist who takes on the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin is stepping into a room already crowded with ghosts — Szeryng at his most patrician, Milstein cutting corners nobody else dared cut, the wiry astringency of period players like Podger or Latry, Heifetz barreling through the Chaconne like he had a train to catch. You can’t un-hear any of it. So the question with a newcomer, or in Gottfried Schneider’s case a veteran making his belated entry into this particular arena, isn’t whether he reinvents the wheel. It’s whether the wheel still turns true.

Schneider has spent the better part of five decades living inside these pieces, by his own account, and that interior knowledge tells. There’s an unforced quality to his phrasing, a musician who long ago stopped performing the music for anyone and simply inhabits it. The opening Adagio of the Sonata No. 1 in G minor unfolds with a patient breath. Not rushed, not fussy, the double-stops allowed to ring rather than scrubbed into submission. Some listeners will want more profile, more rhetorical underlining of the harmonic surprises; Schneider tends to let Bach’s own counterpoint do the talking.

Where this pays off is in the fugues, and there are four of them scattered through the sonatas, each a small marvel of one instrument pretending to be three or four. The Fuga of the Sonata No. 2 in A minor is long, discursive, prone under lesser hands to sagging in the middle. Schneider paces it with the instincts of a chamber performer who has spent a career listening to other voices. He’s held serious teaching and leadership posts, and you hear a player used to balancing lines rather than dominating them. The architecture holds. Not every entrance is ideally etched — a couple of inner-voice moments go a bit grey, sunk slightly under the top line — but the long view is never lost.

The Partitas fare beautifully too, though differently. The Partita No. 1 in B minor, with its doubles chasing each movement like a shadow, gets playing of real elegance; the Corrente’s Double has a breathless quality, bowed with a lightness that doesn’t sacrifice clarity for speed. Then there’s the Chaconne, the enormous summit at the close of the Partita No. 2 in D minor — fifteen minutes, give or take, of variations that Brahms once said would drive a man mad trying to write for two hands what Bach made one violin suggest. Schneider doesn’t go in for grand Romantic sweep here, nor the glassy objectivity of the period-reading crowd. He finds something in between: weighty but not thick, the arpeggiated variations rolled out with an unhurried gravity, the major-mode middle section genuinely consoling rather than merely a change of key signature.

Intonation in the thicker chordal writing is mostly secure. Not flawless — in a few of the più forte triple-stops in the C major Sonata’s fugue you can hear him negotiating rather than simply nailing the sonority. Minor stuff. The violin itself — warm, a little veiled in the upper register, never strident — is caught well by the engineering, close enough to hear bow changes and rosin dust, distant enough that it doesn’t feel like a dissection.

Does it unseat Fischer’s poised intellectual command, or Podger’s gut-strung immediacy, or Perlman’s unapologetic Romanticism? No. It needn’t. This isn’t a performance angling for a throne. It’s the testimony of a musician who has lived with Bach’s cosmos, in his own word, long enough to stop needing to prove anything about it. Recommended — not as a first choice necessarily, but as a deeply satisfying later one, for those who already know this music well enough to appreciate a guide who isn’t shouting directions.