Bach: Six Violin Sonatas for Keyboard and Violin

Call them what you will — violin sonatas, keyboard sonatas, or, as one important manuscript has it, Sechs Trios für Clavier und die Violone — but the title question matters here, because this new disc answers it decisively. These are keyboard pieces. The harpsichord doesn’t accompany; it leads, elaborates, dominates. The violin completes the texture.

Christoph Wolff’s booklet essay reminds us that Bach had a fondness for grouping works in sixes — the Brandenburg Concertos, the English and French Suites, the solo violin works, the cello suites — and these six sonatas form just such a closed set, coherent in purpose and remarkably unified in spirit. The trio-sonata ancestry is audible throughout. Three independent voices, tripartite counterpoint threading through the keyboard’s two hands and the violin’s single line — it’s a Baroque convention Bach made peculiarly his own, most famously in the organ trio sonatas. But these harpsichord-and-violin works push further. Malcolm Boyd, in his volume on Bach in the old Dent Master Musicians series, points out passages that seem to anticipate Haydn, Mozart, even Schubert. He’s right. The harmonic adventurousness occasionally stops you cold.

They don’t get the attention they deserve. Not quite in the same solar system as the Brandenburgs, perhaps, and less frequently played than the solo violin sonatas and partitas — works of comparable intellectual rigor but frankly more forbidding in their unaccompanied austerity. These six feel warmer. More approachable. The interplay between the two instruments generates a conversational intimacy that the solo works, magnificent as they are, simply can’t replicate.

Ton Koopman is involved. That fact alone carries weight. His discography is not flawless — enthusiasm occasionally outruns judgment, and there are moments here where his exuberance tips slightly past the point of elegance — but the standard of his work across decades is remarkable. His two-disc recording of Handel’s Op. 4 and Op. 7 organ concertos on Warner Apex remains my personal benchmark for those works, a genuine bargain that happens also to be the most musicianly account I know. These Bach recordings won’t displace it from the deepest corner of my affection. But they come close to that shelf.

The comparison to Florilegium on Channel Classics, London Baroque on BIS, the King’s Consort on Hyperion, the Brook Street Band on Avie — all of them admirable in their various ways, all of them offering instrumental recreations of the organ trio sonatas — is instructive. Even the best of those transcriptions feel somehow cautious beside the originals. Bach’s voice in this repertoire has a specificity, a grain, that resists transplantation.

Catherine Manson plays with intelligence and tonal control, never merely decorating what Koopman is doing in the keyboard part. The balance between them is right — not artificially equalized, but genuinely negotiated, phrase by phrase. This is chamber music as conversation rather than reading, which is precisely what the music asks for.

Worth your time. Considerably.