Tartini: 30 Sonate piccole – Sheppard Skærved

Every violinist who has ever bitten off more than they could chew has genuflected before the “Devil’s Trill,” and forgotten that its composer spent the better part of his later decades hunched over a desk in Padua, calculating the ratios of overtones like a man possessed by Pythagoras rather than Satan. That’s the Tartini nobody plays at competitions: the acoustician, the theorist, the perfectionist who kept fiddling (pun intended, sorry) with a project so vast it makes the 48 look modest by comparison.

The Sonate piccole are that project’s orphaned children. Thirty of them, or twenty-six, depending on whom you ask and which manuscript they’ve squinted at longest in the reading room of the Basilica del Santo. Peter Sheppard Skærved has apparently done more squinting than most, and his claim of thirty sonatas in Tartini’s own hand, pending his critical edition, is the kind of scholarly needle-threading that will matter enormously to about two hundred people worldwide and not at all to everyone else, who will simply want to know: does the playing convince?

Mostly, gloriously, yes.

Skærved records close, uncomfortably close in places. You hear rosin dust, bow changes, the faint creak of gut under pressure (he plays a period-appropriate setup, and you can tell). This is a choice, not an accident, and it pays off in a repertoire built on illusion: these sonatas imply a bass line that isn’t there, conjure harmony out of double-stops and resonance rather than any written accompaniment. Tartini wanted the violin alone to suggest a fuller world, the way a skilled watercolorist suggests a forest with three strokes of grey-green. Recorded from a comfortable distance, that illusion evaporates. Up close, it works. You feel the harmonic implications vibrating in the wood.

No. 1 opens with a little fanfare, complete with echo effects that Skærved dispatches with real wit, alternating full tone and ghostly piano as if two violinists were trading remarks across a courtyard. The Allegro that follows was apparently conceived as a finale. Tartini being Tartini, he then appended a Gigue anyway, as though he couldn’t quite let the piece end. Sonata No. 2 contains a Siciliana of genuinely startling harmonic desolation; Skærved leans into its strange, almost modal sorrow without exaggerating it, and the contrast with the martial Allegro that follows is sharp, almost theatrical. The closing affettuoso, marked slow but stuffed with fingerwork that would tax a far showier violinist, gets a reading that’s technically assured without ever feeling merely athletic.

It’s No. 4 where things turn genuinely interesting. The opening movement inhabits an interior, brooding space. You can hear, faintly, the direction chamber music would take a generation later, the cantabile lines that Kreutzer and Rode and Baillot would eventually refine into the French violin school’s house style. Tartini as ancestor, not just as showman. Then, without warning, a Grave of almost embarrassing simplicity: no ornament, no display, just a bare melodic line laid out like a folk tune remembered imperfectly. Skærved doesn’t oversell it. He lets the plainness sit there, unadorned, and it’s more affecting for the restraint.

No. 5’s second movement turns positively ornithological, birdsong worked into the fabric of the writing, a Tartini specialty that gets undersold in the textbooks, and the following Allegro assai has the guileless charm of a children’s song, phrased here with a lightness that never curdles into cuteness. This is where Skærved’s instincts serve him best: he resists the temptation to make everything Sturm und Drang. Tartini could do storm and stress, certainly, but he could also do a shrug, a wink, a nursery tune, and this disc understands the difference.

Complaints? A few. The close balance occasionally turns brilliance into abrasiveness, particularly in sustained upper-register passages where the microphone seems to sit an inch from the bridge. And listeners coming to Tartini only through the “Devil’s Trill,” probably still the Kreisler-tradition war-horse release, or more recently Giuliano Carmignola’s flashier accounts, may find these smaller sonatas modest by comparison, lacking a single killer movement to hang a whole disc’s reputation on. That’s rather the point, though. This isn’t repertoire built for applause. It’s repertoire built for understanding a mind that never stopped calculating, even while it sang.

Skærved has made a persuasive case for music that history has mostly filed under “minor,” and done so with scholarship to back the bowing. I look forward to the rest of the thirty, or twenty-six, whichever number the manuscripts finally yield.