Johnny Gandelsman, violin
James Wilson, cello
Dec. 16, Church of the Holy Comforter, Episcopal
Johann Sebastian Bach’s works for unaccompanied strings, the six sonatas and partitas for violin and six suites for cello, are among the greatest balancing acts in music, requiring advanced instrumental technique and mastery of musical structure, along with the sensitivity to turn abstract constructs into vehicles for expression, much like soliloquies in spoken drama.
The Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, which has featured this music regularly over its two-decade history, reprised it in a holiday-season candlelight concert featuring the society’s founder and artistic director, cellist James Wilson, and violinist Johnny Gandelsman, an artist best-known as an advocate for new and cross-cultural music – a role that earned him a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” earlier this year – who nonetheless keeps Bach central to his repertory.
Performing before a capacity crowd, probably the largest ever to attend a Chamber Music Society event, Gandelsman played Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 – home of the great Chaconne – and his violin arrangement of the Cello Suite No. 6 in D major, BWV 1012, while Wilson played the most familiar of the cello suites, No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, and the darkest and deepest of the set, No. 5 in C minor, BWV 1011.
As in his past Bach performances in Richmond, Gandelsman emphasized the folk-dance-adjacent, verging on rustic, qualities of these works. A briskly paced, sharply accented reading of the Chaconne was characteristic of his approach: infectiously animated, toe-tapping as he played, in gavottes and gigues, keenly attuned to expressive affect in preludes and slow dances, vividly colorful at all speeds.
Wilson, who in contrast to Gandelsman’s choice of a modern violin played a baroque cello and bow, leaned into the lean, at times fibrous, tonal qualities of the period-style instrument, most strikingly in the C minor Suite – “melancholy and super-crunchy,” as he described the work in preparatory remarks. Intonation and projection, the most challenging aspects of playing early instruments, rarely fazed the cellist (only one break for onstage re-tuning) and never muted his expressive voice.