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This all started with a Washington Post article that I stumbled upon. I don’t remember how I found this article, but I imagine I was reading up on my then-favorite violinist, Joshua Bell, who also happens to share my birthday.
The article, “PEARLS BEFORE BREAKFAST,” describes an experiment in which Joshua Bell played incognito in a D.C. metro station during rush hour, and was generally completely ignored by the busy commuters.
The author, Gene Weingarten, used the results of this experiment to lament the busy hustle and bustle of modern life, the lack of time to stop and smell the roses, our loss of appreciation for classical music, etc, etc.
(As a side note, Weingarten won both praise for the originality of his experiment as well as a Pulitzer Prize, but a few months later, he discovered that an almost identical experiment was conducted in 1930, with very similar results. Oops!)
Anyway, the first piece that Joshua Bell played was the final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin, the monumental Chaconne.
Every once in awhile, I hear a piece that grabs me from my very first listen, and the Chaconne hooked me from the opening chord. (You can hear Joshua Bell’s version, complete with background noise, by clicking on the article link above.)
This is how the article describes it:
Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."
Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.
If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."
Pretty amazing stuff, right? It certainly seemed so to me.
I desperately wanted a recording. However, Mr. Bell has not recorded the Chaconne, so I set off to find a version I liked.
I went to Amazon.com and discovered that I could compare several recordings side-by-side by browsing the mp3 downloads. I’m not sure if this was on purpose or not, but for the sample clip, Amazon uses the same section of the song, so it was very easy to make direct comparisons. And what variety of tone and phrasing and tempo!
Well, by going through the list, I found one that I particularly liked—the version by Julia Fischer, whom I had never heard of.
I read the glowing reviews, did some research and discovered that not only was she a virtuoso violinist, but also a professional pianist, and more impressively, born the same year as me!
I ended up purchasing the CD (highly recommended) and several other of her releases, and that is how I became a fan.
You can read more about Julia Fischer and hear her playing that fabulous Chaconne here.
More on the fabulous Ms. Fischer to follow later!
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