Johann Sebastian Bach – Partita for solo violin Nº 2 in D minor, BWV 1004. 1720. Chaconne. Hilary Hahn, Violin, 1997.
In 1999, Hahn said that she played Bach more than any other composer and that she had played solo Bach pieces every day since she was eight. “Bach is, for me, the touchstone that keeps my playing honest. Keeping the intonation pure in double stops, bringing out the various voices where the phrasing requires it, crossing the strings so that there are not inadvertent accents, presenting the structure in such a way that it’s clear to the listener without being pedantic — one can’t fake things in Bach, and if one gets all of them to work, the music sings in the most wonderful way.” — Hilary Hahn, Saint Paul Sunday
In a segment on NPR entitled “Musicians in Their Own Words”, Hahn speaks about the surreal experience of playing the Bach Chaconne (from the Partita for Violin No. 2) alone on the concert stage.
The Partitas are generally more extended, and of unorthodox formal design (as perhaps is implied by their more wide-ranging generic title), and by the more exploratory, improvisatory feel of the music even as they consist of sequences of Baroque dances. The awesome and eloquent Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004, seems for the most part to follow the conventional outline of the Baroque suite.
The concluding movement of Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 emphasis the most labyrinthine and intellectually powerful single movement ever devised for an unaccompanied string instrument. This is Bach’s famous Chaconne (originally “Ciaccona”), a colossal arched series of 64 stunning variants upon the stark, open-ended four-measure phrase heard at the beginning. Two monumental outer sections in the minor enclose a major-key central episode, and this great structure encompasses every aspect of violin-playing technique and contrapuntal ingenuity that would have been known in Bach’s day. The Chaconne, whose duration exceeds 15 minutes (and is thus longer than the rest of the work put together) is often performed as a free-standing movement and has also been widely transcribed for other instruments.