Bach understood death the way a carpenter understands wood — from the inside out, feeling the grain. He buried ten of his twenty children. He copied out the St. Matthew Passion in his own hand when his eyesight was nearly gone. By the time he was writing the great solo violin works in Köthen, around 1720, he had already buried his first wife, Maria Barbara, and grief — whatever that word means when it hardens into art — had become a working material, something he shaped rather than merely suffered.
All of this is background to a recording that asks us to hear the Partita in d minor differently. Completely differently, in fact.
The musicologist Helga Thoene has argued — carefully, with musical examples — that Bach embedded chorale melodies throughout the Partita, especially in the immense Chaconne that ends it, and that these melodies are specifically associated with death, mourning, resurrection. The thesis is not universally accepted. It is, however, extraordinarily suggestive. Nigel Simeone and others have been skeptical; the Hilliard Ensemble and violinist Christoph Poppen took Thoene’s ideas seriously enough to build their own ECM disc, Morimur, around them more than twenty years ago. That recording remains a touchstone — severe, searching, and in its way quite luminous.
This new version stakes out different territory.
Where Poppen and the Hilliards approached Thoene’s thesis almost forensically — more chorales, more examples, more deliberate layering of evidence — the present disc is content to let the music make its own argument. The chorales from the St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion are interspersed among the Partita’s movements, and for the Chaconne the voices join the violin, their lines rising quietly through the texture like candlelight through paper. The effect is less demonstration than experience. You are not being taught. You are being moved.
Gordan Nikolitch plays with a lean, autumnal tone — not thin, but stripped of any unnecessary warmth, which is exactly right. In the earlier movements he holds something back. The Allemanda breathes slowly, phrases falling away into silence without quite resolving, and the Corrente has an almost reluctant forward motion, as if the music knows where it’s going and is not in any hurry to arrive. By the time the Chaconne begins, some thirty-odd minutes in, the ground has been prepared. The great opening statement lands with its full weight.
Tenebrae, conducted by Nigel Short, sing with a blend that is simply exceptional. The ensemble recorded at St. Giles’ Cripplegate — a Wren church rebuilt after wartime bombing, its acoustic both warm and precise — and the space seems to have been designed with them in mind. “Ach Herr, lass dein lieb Engelein,” from the St. John Passion, is the most quietly devastating of the chorales here: Grace Davidson’s soprano threads through the top of the texture without ever insisting on itself, and the harmonic resolutions arrive with a tenderness that’s almost unbearable.
William Gaunt sings the baritone solos with plain, unaffected authority. No swooning. No demonstrating. This is Protestant church music — it demands a certain restraint, a willingness to serve the text rather than the voice — and Gaunt understands that completely.
One legitimate objection: unlike Morimur, this disc does not include a separate, unadorned reading of the Partita. Poppen plays it both ways, and that structural decision gives the listener a chance to move between contexts — to hear the music as pure violin writing and then to hear it again transformed. Nikolitch doesn’t have that option here, presumably for reasons of space, and the absence matters slightly. The Chaconne in particular is one of those pieces you want to encounter whole, on its own terms, before anything else touches it.
That said, the double performance of the Chaconne — violin and voices together — is the disc’s emotional and intellectual center, and it earns its place. You can follow Thoene’s argument in the booklet and hear exactly where the chorale melodies surface. Or you can simply listen, let the music wash over you, and not worry about any of it. Both experiences are available. Both are valid. The disc is generous enough to allow for that.
Fauré’s Requiem closes the program, and the choice is shrewder than it might first appear. Fauré famously described his Requiem as a “lullaby of death” — not terrifying, not theatrical, but consoling. After the long meditation of the Bach, this is arrival rather than contrast. The “In Paradisum” dissolves into the upper air and the disc ends in something very close to silence.
A profoundly considered release. Keep it.
