Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
Kyung Wha Chung’s is a very fine violinist, but I’m afraid this
recording didn’t do it for me. A number of professional reviewers
have expressed admiration, but for me her tone often sounds harsh and
her phrasing and tempo variations seem to me to be idiosyncratic to
the point of seriously distracting from the music. In the mighty
Chaconne from the D minor Partita, for example, rather than the long,
involving and often spiritual journey it should be, it felt to me
more like a series of brief, disjointed vignettes and lost much of
its meaning.
I don’t want to be too harsh. This is a personal view which many others don’t share and there are, of course, many ways of interpreting these magnificent works. Chung meets the technical challenges here very well, so this recording may well appeal to you. For me, though, Rachel Podger, Viktoria Mullova and Isobel Faust, in their different ways, all get to the heart of the works and of Bach in a way that Kyung Wha Chung doesn’t.
