RECITAL REVIEW

John Holloway

October 21, 2006

John Holloway


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Searching for the Art of Baroque

By Michelle Dulak Thomson

Baroque violinist John Holloway's first recording venture was, I think, the complete Handel chamber music with the chamber ensemble L'Ecole d'Orphée, close to 30 years ago. But since then his territory looks like it has a large hole in it where Bach should be: There was that long stint as Roger Norrington's concertmaster in the London Classical Players' recordings of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and beyond. And a longer, justly celebrated series of recordings of 17th century music. So I was looking forward to Holloway's all-solo Bach concert at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley on Saturday night. Holloway's essay on performing the Sonatas and Partitas (published in the October 2006 San Francisco Early Music Society newsletter and reprinted in the program) made it even more enticing. On the program were the Second and Third Partitas and the Second Sonata. Who could resist?

Holloway writes that he, like every violinist, grew up with the Sonatas and Partitas as standard repertory, and that he approached them from the later violin canon and went backward. (They are, in fact, about the earliest music a "modern" violin student plays, though one or two Corelli sonatas do sometimes make the list.) This time around, he was tackling them "from some part of [their] past," as a listener-performer steeped in Biber, Schmelzer, and Buxtehude. There aren't many violinists who have taken on this music after such a singleminded concentration on the generation or two prior. Where would this go?

Fingering the problem

Certainly there was a great deal to like. Holloway makes a clear, bright, dense, and incisive sound. The fast movements, at their best, were marvelous: crisp bowing allied to pure intonation and clear direction. Unfortunately, none of the movements were quite at that level all the way through. The intonation was puzzling, because when it was "on" it was flawless, but when it was "off" it was spectacularly so. It might have something to do with Holloway's fingering choices, which were quite unusual from a modern perspective, and much more so from a period one. Holloway avoided open strings to a degree I've never seen in a "Baroque" violinist. Further, he spent much more time than you'd expect in second and third positions where it's not strictly necessary. It was fascinating fingerwork — I'd love to see a Holloway Edition of the Sonatas and Partitas. It did seem, though, to invite intonational perils in places where a mis-shift of the whole hand might put a half-dozen notes out of whack.

But the odd wrong note is no big deal in this daunting music. What I longed for, and didn't get, was all that a Baroque player ought to be able to bring to this music. There are things outside the experience of most "modern" violinists that "Baroque" players have brought into solo Bach playing, to its immense benefit. One is feeling meter — understanding a dance as a dance, and an instrumental aria as just that, a wordless version of a song, with a song's harmonic rhythm as its bones. Another is inflecting a bass line as though it were actually a continuo line, even when it's just one strand of a polyphonic violin part.

These Holloway didn't do. Just about the hardest things in solo Bach are the the slow compound-duple dances — the Siciliano of the first Sonata and the Loure of the third Partita. How do you convey the meter? How do you apportion the emphasis among beats and sub-beats? How do you make it dance? Holloway's Loure just didn't. It was six beats to the bar, and if there were internal emphases intended within that, they were inaudible. Likewise, the Sarabande of the D-Minor Partita didn't sound quite like a Sarabande, not only because there wasn't the expected metrical emphasis, but also because sometimes the measure didn't get full count. I rather liked the device of arpeggiating up and down the chords at the end of the second section the second time through. But I didn't like losing a whole beat from the second of them as though meter meant nothing.

Missing the Baroque in the beat

The opening Adagio of the A-Minor Sonata (and the corresponding movement of the G-Minor Sonata, which was the encore) suffered the same way. The old, "modern-instrument" difficulty with these movements was that every last minuscule note would be allotted its exact value. The "period" discovery was that all those flurries of notes were written-out embellishments over a bass line. That still seemed to suggest that the bass line moved along at a given tread. Holloway's bass line, by contrast, moved when he felt like moving it. It made me nostalgic for the bad old "romantic" Bach: If we are to lose the "period" sense of meter, I'd rather listen to players who do more in its absence.

As for the big movements, the A-Minor's Fuga and the D-Minor's Ciaccona, I wish there had been more large-scale shape to go with the undoubtably impressive small-scale articulation of the music. Ending the Ciaccona piano took some guts, though.

Holloway played the entire recital from music, and during the first two-thirds of it he was sitting down. I don't think I have ever seen an adult violinist play solo Bach from music before. Was it just for fear of memory slips? (It seems unlikely; surely no one who knows this music well enough to record it is likely to go astray.) Or was it a symbolic affirmation of fidelity to the text? Holloway generally arranged things so that there weren't page turns internal to movements. Except that there was one dramatic turn at the transition from minore to maggiore in the D-Minor Partita's Ciaccona.

Those legions of us violinists who have learned that music from Ivan Galamian's venerable International Music Co. edition (with the autograph facsimile in the back) know that there's no page break there in the manuscript. So the break in Holloway's copy was probably courtesy of photocopy technology. But, in that case, why have to turn a page at all? Either string out the whole piece on a bunch of stands like a new-music player, or stop where the turns are in the manuscript, as someone actually reading from the source would have had to do. Or else play from memory, like pretty much everyone who's performed this music since it entered the standard repertory.

(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)

©2006 Michelle Dulak Thomson, all rights reserved