Lipiński Violin Showpieces – Bartek Niziol

Nobody remembers Karol Lipiński these days without prompting, and that’s a shame — though listening straight through this disc, you begin to understand why history filed him under footnote rather than headline. He was the fiddler Paganini himself ranked second only to Paganini, a compliment that has followed Lipiński around for two centuries like a shadow he never quite managed to step out of. Comparisons are odious, Byron said, or someone said. But in this case they’re also unavoidable, since Lipiński more or less invited them, modeling his caprices directly on the Italian’s, chasing the same audiences, the same publishers, the same operatic sources for salon transcription. He wanted to be Paganini. He ended up being Lipiński, which is a different, smaller thing, and this album, sincere, well-prepared, occasionally thrilling, doesn’t quite argue otherwise.

Start with the Morceaux de salon on motifs from Rossini, six confections published in Mainz in 1842 that show Lipiński at his most genial. This is drawing-room music, meant to flatter both performer and listener, and Bartek Niziol understands the assignment. “La Serenata” wants a singing tone and an unbroken legato line, bel canto transplanted onto four strings, and Niziol delivers it with a sweetness that never curdles into syrup. “La Danza,” the closest thing here to a hit tune, has the rhythmic snap of tarantella cross-bred with salon wit. Niziol’s bow articulates the dotted rhythms crisply, though I’d have liked a touch more abandon, a little dirt under the fingernails. “L’orgia” is the cheekiest of the set and comes off best. There’s real comic timing in the phrasing, little hesitations before the punch line. Pawel Andrzej Mazurkiewicz’s piano is mostly discreet accompaniment throughout, sensibly so; this is music where the pianist’s job is to stay out of the way, and he does it with tact.

The Fantasia and Variations on Bellini’s La sonnambula, op. 23, is the meatiest item on the program: introduction, theme, five variations, the last of which sprawls on well past the point where Paganini would have stopped for applause. This is Lipiński’s bid for virtuoso immortality, full of ricochet bowing, thickets of double stops, and the sort of pyrotechnic filigree that either dazzles or exhausts depending on who’s playing it. Niziol’s technique is more than equal to the demands. His ricochet passages have a nice dry crackle, like kindling catching, and there’s real pathos in the slower variation, a sense that under all the fireworks Lipiński actually loved this tune. But the piece as a whole doesn’t cohere the way Paganini’s best variations do. It accumulates rather than builds, and even superb advocacy can’t fully disguise the seams.

Then, alone, Mazurkiewicz sits this one out, come the Three Caprices, op. 29, unaccompanied and unforgiving. Here I have reservations.

Niziol plays with obvious command; intonation is secure even in the stratospheric passages, and he never sounds rattled by the technical demands, which is no small thing given how relentlessly these pieces pile on double-stops, left-hand pizzicato, thematic ornamentation stacked on ornamentation. But there’s a literalness to his approach that flattens the music’s rhetoric. Paganini’s own caprices survive on personality as much as craft, that sense of a performer teetering deliciously on the edge of catastrophe, daring the audience to watch him fall. Niziol never teeters. Everything is placed, correct, a little safe. The caprices come out sounding like very difficult études rather than acts of musical theater, and something in Lipiński’s showman’s spirit goes missing in the transaction.

The brief “Three Mélodies Italiennes” from Bellini’s Parisina, barely two minutes total, function as a charming afterthought: a palate cleanser after the caprices’ austerity, sweet and unpretentious.

Is there a rival version to weigh this against? Not really, not in any depth. Lipiński has attracted shockingly little advocacy on disc, and that alone makes this release valuable regardless of its imperfections. Piotr Milewski recorded some of the caprices years back with perhaps more swagger and less polish; nobody has attempted the Sonnambula fantasy with comparable commitment recently, so far as I’m aware. For repertoire this obscure, completeness and competence count for a great deal, and this disc has both in abundance.

Recommended, then, for the repertoire’s sake as much as the performances’, though Niziol and Mazurkiewicz acquit themselves honorably throughout. Lipiński was never going to unseat Paganini in the history books. But he deserves better than total silence, and this disc, whatever its small cautions, argues his case with evident affection.