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Fanfare Magazine: 43:2 (11-12/2019) 
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Renaud Capuçon and David Fray perform four of Bach’s six sonatas for violin and keyboard, in this case on violin and piano. The choice allows both performers to indulge in subtleties otherwise more difficult to achieve—Fray of course having available all the dynamic possibilities the piano offers, but Capuçon being able to engage in a dialogue with a fully equal partner. (Arthur Grumiaux, whose set has been widely praised, played with the partnership of a cello, in some sonatas perhaps anomalously, although he hardly represented himself as an exponent of period authenticity.) Capuçon and Fray explore their modern expressive capabilities not only in the slow movements (for example, the opening movement of the F-Minor Sonata, with its interchange of highly nuanced melodic gestures) but in the fast ones as well, in which the piano threads its way through the contrapuntal complexities as nimbly (arguably more nimbly) than any harpsichord could do. In the third movement, the accompanying patterns with which Bach underlies the violin’s drooping double-stops sound particularly engaging in Fray’s sprightly reimaginings of them. He also manages to bring exceptional authority to the finale’s keyboard part. Listeners can contemplate the competing merits (in some philosophies) of two questions bearing on performance: First, what instruments might the composer have intended, used, or tolerated, either generally or at a particular time in a particular venue; second, what combination of instruments allows the performers to explore their musical ideas most widely and deeply and to express them most richly and fully. Many may feel that doctrine should play a more humble part in that deliberation. The use of the piano doesn’t create an unwelcome heaviness in briskly flowing polyphonic passages, such as the fugal ones in the second movement of the Sonata in E Major, and it only enhances the liquid lyricism of the succeeding Adagio ma non tanto. The first movement of the C-Minor Sonata, with its connections to the St. Matthew Passion, sounds arguably lighter and airier on account of the piano’s participation, and the sonata’s Adagio emerges as an especially affecting conversation.
 

There’s a long tradition of performing and recording these works on modern violin and piano (Adolf Busch and Rudolph Serkin recorded some of them that way as early as 1929); and who wishes to see one orthodoxy supplanted by another? So, dogma aside, a strong positive recommendation for Capuçon’s and Fray’s perceptive and, at times, even revelatory performances is in order. The medium isn’t the message.

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