In the vast solo violin repertoire, Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Violin stand as an unknowable Everest, an inscrutable document with as many different interpretations as the U.S. Constitution — or the Talmud. There is the question of how to play them — those impossible-seeming rows of chords and double-stops; are they broken into separate notes? Are they suggestions? — as well as on what instrument — is Bach played on a modern violin, with its steel strings and sweetened intonation, somehow wrong? On top of that lie multiple, unanswerable questions of interpretation. Bach's pieces are labyrinthine and bottomless, with each measure a many-branched path to pick through, and violinists from Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin to Hilary Hahn and Gidon Kremer have offered personal, wildly divergent, takes.

The intellectually omnivorous Isabelle Faust is just the latest violinist to enter the labyrinth. She savors the littler moments; one gets the sense of her making her way through these pieces carefully and lovingly, never too keen to get out and move on. Where Arthur Grumiaux held tight to the rhythmic line driving these pieces, Faust stretches out, allowing herself to get caught in eddying little melodic currents. Her tone on the D… read more »