Bach Sonatas and Partitas – Christine Busch

There is no violinist, however gifted, who approaches these six works without ghosts in the room: Szeryng’s patrician poise, Milstein’s steel-spring rhythm, Kremer’s febrile intensity, and lately a whole generation of gut-string pilgrims trying to shake off a century of Romantic varnish. Christine Busch, who has spent her career in the choir stalls and continuo sections of Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale and, before that, under Harnoncourt’s exacting baton in Vienna, arrives at the Sonatas and Partitas less as a conquering soloist than as an exceptionally patient reader. That patience is the whole story here, for better and, very occasionally, for worse.

Her instrument is an eighteenth-century violin, Tyrolean by conjecture, strung presumably in gut, and her bow a modern replica after a model from around 1730, the kind of equipment that invites agility, bite, quickness of speech. What’s unexpected is how rarely she cashes that check. Busch is in no hurry. She has gone back to the autograph facsimile rather than any received edition, and you can hear her thinking through Bach’s own ambiguous slurs and beaming in real time, weighing each one rather than inheriting someone else’s solution.

Take the Adagio of the Sonata No. 1 in G minor. Most period players treat this movement as an exercise in melodic filigree over a walking bass, tossing off the triplet figuration with an almost conversational lightness. Busch slows the harmonic rhythm down until you hear the suspensions ache. Accompanying voices, alto, tenor, whatever Bach’s imaginary four-part texture implies at any instant, are given real weight, not swallowed into the melodic line. It’s unfashionable. It’s also, movement by movement, rather moving, the sort of interpretive choice that only makes sense once you’ve heard it through.

The contrapuntal fugues are where this approach pays its clearest dividends and exacts its clearest cost. In the Fuga of the Sonata No. 2 in A minor, her left-hand clarity in voicing the subject against its inversions is genuinely impressive. You can follow entries the way you’d follow a choral fugue, each strand given its own color, its own dynamic shading. But the tempo sags. Deliberation tips into inertia somewhere past the midpoint, and the music, which wants propulsion even in its most severe academic garb, loses a little blood.

Elsewhere the steadiness serves her beautifully. The Allemande of the Partita No. 1 in B minor unfolds with an almost spoken rhetoric, each ornament placed rather than tossed off. Her chordal playing in the Sarabande, and chords are where so many period performances turn scratchy, splintered by an over-literal arpeggiation, stays rounded, judiciously balanced between the bass note and the upper voices. No aggression in the bow arm here. And in the Tempo di Borea that closes the suite, a movement that generations of virtuosi have used as a vehicle for Romantic acceleration, Heifetz famously treating it as a sprint, Busch simply declines the invitation. The dance stays a dance. It does not become a showpiece.

The Chaconne that crowns the Partita No. 2 in D minor is, inevitably, the test. Busch’s reading has an almost liturgical steadiness to it, logical in its long-range harmonic planning, unwilling to indulge the variations that invite rubato and swoon. Those who want the cumulative, almost orchestral grandeur of a Milstein, or the volatile extremes of a Kremer, will find this reading austere, maybe even withholding. I found myself admiring its architecture more than I was swept up by it. Though on a second hearing, late at night, headphones on, its refusal to overplay its hand started to seem less like reticence than conviction.

This is not a Bach cycle that announces itself through personality, the way Rachel Podger’s does, or through sheer interpretive daring, the way Isabelle Faust’s does. Busch’s gift is a kind of scholarly humility married to real tonal sensitivity. The sound itself is warm, never thin or acidic as period-instrument Bach sometimes can be. She trusts the text, trusts the architecture, trusts silence. Mostly that trust is rewarded.

A distinguished, sometimes demanding set, then: not a first choice for listeners wanting edge-of-seat excitement, but a genuinely illuminating one for anyone who thinks they already know this music cold. Busch makes you listen again, slower than you’re used to. That alone is worth the two discs.