Tartini never quite gets his due. The Devil’s Trill sonata looms so large in the popular imagination — that story of a dream, the devil at the bedside with a violin, the music that followed upon waking — that everything else the man wrote tends to dissolve into its shadow. Which is a shame, because Tartini spent decades thinking seriously about violin artistry, about acoustics, about the nature of melody itself, and the 30 so-called Sonate Piccole represent the summation of that thinking, six hours of solo violin music conceived as a unified whole. One of the longest works ever written for a single instrument. Almost nobody knows it.
Peter Sheppard Skærved does.
The British violinist has spent years assembling new source materials for these sonatas, working from manuscripts that correct or supplement the published edition — which, it turns out, contains only 26 of the 30. That matters. And it gives his project a scholarly authority that the competing Slovenian traversal by Crtomir Žikovic, recorded in the late 1990s, simply cannot match, whatever its other virtues.
So: is this first volume worth your time?
Yes, conditionally. The conditions are real.
Tartini in his later years was responding to shifting tastes — away from the knotty contrapuntal density that Bach was simultaneously perfecting in near-total obscurity, toward something more transparently melodic, more immediately pleasing to an audience that wanted to be charmed rather than challenged. The Sonate Piccole are the product of that moment. The virtuosic demands are never absent — Tartini was constitutionally incapable of writing something that didn’t push the instrument — but they’re folded into a melodic surface that can feel, if you’re not paying attention, merely pretty. These are not the Bach sonatas and partitas. Let’s be honest about that. The emotional range is narrower, the harmonic adventure more restrained, the sense of large-scale architecture less commanding. A listener moving through this first disc might struggle to say, afterward, what distinguished the sonata in g major from the one in d major beyond a shift in mode and temperament.
Sheppard Skærved understands this problem and addresses it with intelligence, if not always with complete success.
His tone is lean and focused — recorded at St. John the Baptist in Aldbury, a small English church whose acoustic is dry enough to expose every bow-change, every subtle inflection of vibrato, every micro-adjustment of intonation. Nothing hides here. That’s a double-edged choice. It rewards Sheppard Skærved’s fastidious attention to articulation — you can hear him thinking through the rhetoric of each phrase, the tiny crescendo into a cadence, the way he pulls back at the top of a melodic arch as if reluctant to let go — but it also means that moments of slight tonal thinness in the upper register register as such, unflattered by any ambient warmth.
What he does consistently well is differentiate character within Tartini’s melodic writing. The slow movements — and Tartini’s slow movements are where his melodic gifts burn brightest — receive playing of genuine expressive weight. The opening movement of the sonata in e minor, for instance, has a quality of sustained inwardness, a long-breathed eloquence, that earns its keep. Sheppard Skærved doesn’t rush to fill silence. He trusts the melody.
The faster movements are crisper, more athletic, and here the scholarly dimension of the project becomes audible in unexpected ways — ornaments placed with historical awareness, not merely habit, so that a trill lands as punctuation rather than decoration.
But six hours is a very long commitment to music that, whatever its quiet merits, does not consistently reward the sustained attention it demands. Žikovic’s cycle will likely be complete first. Sheppard Skærved’s will almost certainly be more authoritative. Neither fact entirely resolves the deeper question: whether the Sonate Piccole, taken in bulk, can hold a general listener’s devotion the way the project clearly holds the performers’. Volume one suggests the answer is maybe — which is not nothing, but it’s not enough to call this essential either.
Start here if you’re curious about a neglected corner of the 18th century. Stay only if the curiosity runs deep.
