Michael Barenboim’s debut recording as a solo violinist seems very much a statement of artistic intent. He has clearly inherited his father Daniel’s enthusiasm for Boulez’s music, and frames this disc with the two versions of Anthèmes from the 1990s, the first purely acoustic, the second using IRCAM’s digital hardware to elaborate and multiply the same capricious material through real-time transformations and reflections.
Both versions get high-voltage performances from Barenboim, and his accounts of Bartók’s immense and immensely difficult Sonata and the third of Bach’s solo sonatas that come between them have the same crackling intensity. Bartók composed his sonata after hearing Yehudi Menuhin play Bach’s C major sonata, and Barenboim emphasises the similarities between the two works, perhaps making the Bach just a little too unremittingly intense in the process. More light and shade in its opening Adagio and a lighter, springier touch to the rhythms of the fugue and in the rather breathless final Allegro might have worked wonders, but the whole sequence makes an impressive collection nevertheless.
