B.A.C.H.

Passacaglia for solo violin
2024

Ensemble: solo violin

Duration: 7 minutes

Commission: George Enescu International Festival

Premiere: Sept 2024, imposed work for all competitors of the George Enescu International Violin Competition

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B.A.C.H., passacaglia for solo violin is an homage to the tradition tracing back to Bach’s Solo Sonatas and Partitas through the heritage of legendary violinists and composers such as Biber, Vivaldi, Tartini, Locatelli, Paganini, Ysaÿe, Kreisler, Enescu, Bartók, Berio, Widmann, as well as to the historical obsession with the BACH motif across works by Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg, Webern, Dallapiccola, Penderecki, Schnittke, Gubaidulina. As such, the BACH motif and the archetypal principle of the passacaglia are projected through a metamodernist prism, in a manner related to some of my previous works such as Cadence En Espace, Concert Transilvan, Little Harmonic Tesseract or Metamorphose after M.C.Escher. As a competition piece, beyond the traditional and extended technical and musical challenges, the work showcases the violinist’s “freedom in control” in perforance.