Violin Portrait: Bach, Brahms, Grieg by Nilla Pierr

Four discs, one violinist, sixty-five years of living distilled into something like ten hours of music. That is a lot of listening to ask of anyone, but Nilla Pierrou earns it, mostly, and the moments where she doesn’t are instructive in their own right.

She has never been a household name outside Scandinavia, which tells you more about the accidents of career-building than about her gifts. Pierrou trained with Sven Karpe in Stockholm and finished with André Gertler in Brussels, a pedigree that matters here, because Gertler’s own lineage traced back through the Hungarian tradition to Jenő Hubay. You can hear that inheritance in the way Pierrou shapes a phrase: never merely accurate, always singing, always leaning very slightly into the note before letting it go.

The Bach that opens the set is the reason to own this box. The D minor partita is the Everest of the unaccompanied literature, violinists have been humbled by it since Joachim’s day, and Pierrou’s account has the kind of unhurried inevitability that only comes from decades of quiet obsession with a single piece. The chaconne runs past fifteen minutes. Some will find that expansive, even indulgent, but nothing sags. Double-stops ring with real resonance rather than effortful strain, and there’s an emotional arc across the variations that many starrier names miss entirely in their rush toward the big statements. The A major sonata, paired with piano rather than continuo instrument, is less persuasive. Eugène De Canck is a sympathetic partner throughout the set, but a modern Steinway blooming under Bach’s figured bass writing feels like a mismatch. One keeps wishing for a harpsichord, or at least a fortepiano, to thin the texture and let Pierrou’s line breathe.

The concertos are where reservations multiply. Orchestral support here, from what was then the Oskarshamn ensemble, later Camerata Roman, now Camerata Nordica, is well-intentioned but foursquare. Tempos drag. Ritardandi arrive like unwanted houseguests, overstaying at cadences that want to keep moving. Set this against, say, the Cologne Chamber Orchestra in comparable repertoire and the difference in rhythmic vitality is almost embarrassing. Only in the closing Allegro assai of the E major concerto does the orchestra finally locate the dance underneath the notes, and by then one has waited a long time for it.

Discs two and three turn to sonata repertoire, and here Pierrou is simply superb. The Brahms A major, op. 100, the “Thun” sonata, sunniest and most lyrical of his three, written during a happy summer by the lake in 1886, receives a reading of real tenderness. The slow movement in particular unfolds with a kind of unforced nostalgia, tone glowing without ever tipping into syrup. There’s Grieg here too, and Schubert, and welcome rarities from Wilhelm Stenhammar and Kodály that most collectors will not have encountered in this coupling. Pierrou’s championing of underplayed repertoire, evident throughout her earlier archival box from a year ago, remains one of her most valuable contributions. Huybrechts and Beckman likewise get idiomatic, unfussy advocacy. Not every violinist bothers with the byways. Fewer still make them sound essential.

The fourth disc, devoted partly to Ysaÿe and to Swedish figures like Lars-Erik Larsson, closes things with real character. Ysaÿe’s unaccompanied writing suits Pierrou’s combination of steel and warmth almost as well as the Bach did.

Sound quality varies, inevitably, given the mixed provenance of LP transfers and studio tapes spanning decades. The Bach A major is dim, oddly veiled next to the vividness elsewhere, though nothing here is unlistenable.

Is this an essential box? For the Bach alone, yes. For the sonata discs, absolutely yes. The concertos are the price of admission, and worth paying, though listeners spoiled by leaner, more athletic orchestral partnerships elsewhere may find themselves reaching for the skip button once or twice. Pierrou at sixty-five, or near it, plays like an artist still curious, still searching, whose anniversary this box celebrates without ever feeling like a mere victory lap.