Perfection in musical performance allows the imagination to take flight.
Listeners, freed from anxiety over varying interpretation, nervous players or just plain wrong notes, can be sent flying into another world or perhaps just a hundred feet up the gothic columns of All Saints.
This might seem an unlikely interpretation of this year’s Brighton Festival theme but anyone lucky enough to hear Isabelle Faust playing Bach will understand it.
The young German violinist performed solo Partitas and Sonatas in a two -part programme of outstanding quality. The music demands a virtuoso technique but it is not the Paganini warhorse that requires a devil behind it: it is a subtle layering of polyphonic melodies, dances, textures and rhythms played on four strings with a horse hair.
Faust, a slight and composed figure, plays with warmth and sensitivity, strength when needed, superfine dynamics, beautiful baroque echoes and the most delicately perfect trills imaginable.
There is a touch of austerity about her performance; something plain and uncompromising which reaches the essence of Bach. There are no histrionics and no frills, just the merest of rallentandos and fractional pauses for breath. Just brilliant, just Bach.
Five stars
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