I put up the John Williams recording a while back. When it came out it seemed to me to be a really valid approach to the piece. It trimmed away the excess additions of the Segovia transcription and had a crisper rhythmic approach and even added a few ornaments here and there. But listening to it now I have to admit that about halfway through, when he gets to the restatement of the original harmonies just before the major section (right around the 6:23 mark), I started to chuckle. Yes, it seemed so incongruous to me that after so much of the piece without a shred of a trace of an ornament, suddenly he decides to add quite a few.
John Williams is a very great guitarist and he is the performer whose wonderful recording of all the "lute" music of Bach made it truly part of the repertoire. But frankly, while a technical marvel and a very solid interpreter, when it comes to the Chaconne he is not very creative. If you are going to adopt Baroque performance practice then you should do it in a comprehensive way, not adding it like whipped cream and a cherry on top. That reminds me a bit of the old guitarists' interpretive standby: anytime you have a passage that is repeated you either do it ponticello or tasto for contrast. This is one of the Segovia quirks that has mercifully disappeared from most interpretations. But slapping in ornaments in one tiny section is not very much more profound.
Don't get me wrong, Segovia was a great artist and a great player of Bach, but he was certainly not a model of Baroque performance practice. John Williams represented a considerable advance in the guitar world's understanding of Bach. But listening to a selection of other performances on guitar, about the best that one can expect, it seems, is a technically solid if rather dull delivery. Here are a couple of examples by John Feeley and Ben Verdery.
So even early on I found myself attracted to performances on the Baroque lute instead of the guitar. Here is a fairly early one by Hopkinson Smith and right from the first chord we encounter a different sensibility.
The most recent Baroque lute version is by Thomas Dunford and he takes us a step further with looser rhythms and some interesting arpeggiations.
One of the most interesting things about the Chaconne is how it tends to reveal the musical personality of the performer--it is a kind of test of your character as an artist. Some of the most interesting performances are found on the harpsichord. Here is an early one by Gustav Leonhardt:
What I really like about this version is the free use of ornaments. In the opening theme, for example, he does mordents on the two A melodic notes that begin each half of the theme. I like this because when I was working on the piece the other day and thinking about how to begin it I came up with two ideas: first, to fill in the third in the first chord, adding an E between the D and F. Then adding a mordent on the next A. This was, I hasten to say, before I listened to the Leonhardt!
But for a really zingy performance let's listen to the very recent one by Jean Rondeau. From the video it looks like he recorded it in his garage:
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If you ever get a chance to see Jorge Caballero play, I'd see if you can talk to him about the Segovia Chaconne, he has a lot of illuminating insights into it. His idea is basically that Segovia's transcription is done more in the spirit of an actual baroque musician in that it's mainly concerned with making the music sound as good, full and rich as you can with the given resources of the instrument. Definitely a controversial take for classical guitarists, but I was fortunate enough to have him walk me through that transcription once and I came away really convinced of it's merits. I mean he really knows his guitar and his Bach, it's not the chaconne but here's a video of him playing BWV 996 in the style of Leonhardt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ApEiKG_0jY
Thanks, Ary. That's a fine and in places very speedy performance. But certainly not in the style of Leonhardt as he even omits fairly obligatory ornaments.
Segovia's transcription of the Chaconne was a huge and brilliant strategic contribution to the repertoire. Up to that point it was not hard for critics to say that the guitar had no significant repertoire. That piece changed the game. But in my post I was considering it from the point of view of its usefulness for my purposes and its fidelity, not to the classical guitar, but rather to Baroque style.
Not in the style of Leonhardt? I know Caballero admires Leonhardt deeply and to my ear this is pretty clearly modeled after Leonhardt's studio recording of the piece. Check that out here if you don't have it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY6n7r178Jw&list=PLFr2P-YW1UZdABJE1cspuwN1oEa65O-j4&index=1
Frankly I don't think you could get much closer to that performance on a guitar (That gigue is just a monster!).
As I have been learning the Chaconne the past few years I have been digging into performances of it, and I'm finding that the less ornamented and "expressive" they are, the better. With this piece, it's really rare that a performer can bring something to the music that improves on the bare notes on the page. This is especially true on the rhythmic side of things. If Baroque dances are dance music, shouldn't people play them that way? I used Ableton Live to set a bunch of Bach dance movements to metronomic tempos and tried them with various kinds of grooves underneath. Maybe Bach doesn't need to be accompanied by breakbeats, but his dance music does sound great with dance-like rhythm. When I play the Chaconne (slowly and badly), I don't feel the need to keep the tempo robotically metronomic, but I do like how it sounds with a mostly steady beat. The "prosaic rhythms" have a cumulative and hypnotic drive to them, and rubato dissipates that energy, it lets the air out of the balloon.
Oh I'd never heard Brouwer's. Curious, it has life and invention, but various aspects are not to my taste. I prefer his Scarlatti recordings, where his style feels better suited to me.
Dunford gave the best performance I'd heard live of the Chaconne at the Wiggy. The recordings I've since heard of him playing it, though good, aren't as incredible as I remember that concert being. He's a very free player; at his best, it can feel like he's just improvising the music (same with Rondeau).
Of all those you link to, though I've only sampled them, I like Rondeau's the best. Many unusual aspects, such as the way he plays with accents and the tempo in the arpeggio section at 3.50, that I really like. It's very exciting!
I am curious what you think of the piano versions. It's not very Baroque... but Busoni's most obviously, which remains commonly-heard at recitals.
Fascinating range of thoughts on the piece--it kind of illustrates my point that the piece tends to bring out the different characters of the players. Re Caballero's BWV 996 vs Leonhardt's, for an example of what I meant by leaving out even the obligatory ornaments such as the trill at the end of the first section, just compare the Bourree.
The two instruments whose performances I avoided in this post were the violin and the piano--I guess because I feel a bit less able to make any useful comments. On the violin I quite like Heifetz who makes no attempt at Baroque style but is formidable none the less. I like Hilary Hahn a lot too and she really takes her time. On the piano I retain very vivid memories of hearing Arthur Rubinstein play the Busoni arrangement in a concert in Spain in 1974 and the timbres were simply amazing.
Ethan, the virtues of a steady beat are undeniable and preferable to arbitrary wandering. But I do feel that each beat has it own weight and each phrase its own shape. The "danciness" of Baroque dance movements varies widely, but the Chaconne would be at the least dancey end of the spectrum.
I had never run into the Brouwer Chaconne before today either. It is "interesting" but yes, his Scarlatti is far better.
For violin performances I have been partial to Hahn and Szigeti (and, of course, got the recording the latter did with Bartok).
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