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

Score available at:

The very challenging commissioned work by Vlad Maistrovici entitled B.A.C.H. Passacaglia for solo violin was a fascinating piece with many unusual colors and special techniques. It brilliantly showcased the ability of these gifted contestants in learning new material in a very short time. It was remarkable how the work came to life both expressively and virtuosically, and was pivotal in helping us in measure the talent of the contestants in the Enescu Competiton.

David Halen

Concertmaster, St. Louis Symphony, Aspen Music Festival

Professor of Violin, String Department Chair, University of Michigan

"Why B.A.C.H.? Because all the wisdom and excesses of the violin history across space and time trace back to the “Old Wig” (J.S.Bach’s sons' nickname for their father), who distilled on 4 strings the essence of our community. We will always need these four letters, even when we may play violin in space, in a different gravity context, because art has the vocation to reconnect us with ourselves and with others."

Vlad Maistorovici, 7 September 2024

Performance notes:

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.

Extract from the 2024 Enescu Competition booklet:

Vlad Maistorovici's B.A.C.H. makes the most of the variational possibilities specific to the passacaglia, while inserting a colour of its own, characterized by the appeal to the palette of contemporary violin techniques. The choice of a slow tempo, on the other hand, allows the performer's technical abilities to be displayed, as we find from the very first bars, in passages of rhythmic complexity. After initially tricking the listener when a brief departure from the initial character (materialized by a brief moment of tuning the instrument, conceived as an acting game), the musical discourse returns to its role with the iteration of the BACH melody, transposed to different pitches. Very exciting are the passages that emphasize the microtones, as we find in a completely different hypostasis in the enescian sound imaginary in Sonata No. 3 for piano and violin, ”in Romanian folk character”. All the more interesting are the sonorities of the finale, in which the melody gradually distorts until total metamorphosis in the violent movements of the bow through the air. Beyond the technical requirements, the score is addressed to violinists endowed with a particular expressiveness, who can convincingly construct a postmodern homage to Bach's personality. (text by Vlad Cristian-Ghinea)