Voyage avec un violon seul

When the first lockdown obliged us to remain isolated, I really wanted to escape to travel with my instrument. It would be a solitary ballad, because I was unable to play with my chamber music companions... at one with my violin in order to explore and to dream.During my research, the Sonate-Monologue by Aram Khatchaturian presented itself to me as the exact musical incarnation of what I was feeling at the time.

In this piece, written at the end of his life and heard very little in concert halls, Aram Khatchaturian imagined a bard, who searches, improvises depending on his mood, transmits poetry and beauty, free but alone.
Passacaille (Passacaglia), signifies "passar" to walk, "calle" in the street. In a word, another promenade, the Passacaille et variations by Thierry De Mey, who I met 15 years ago at Subsistences in Lyon, and whose work has fascinated me since day one.

This beautiful piece written for, and by dance (Thierry is the brother of Michèle Anne De Mey, the choreographer), is constructed like a suite of baroque dances, always eminently rhythmic, an echo of Béla Bartok’s sonata for solo violin and the partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Taken from the second partita, the longest movement of the sonatas and partitas, the Chaconne, this slow dance, sister of the passacaglia, is the dream of every violinist: a masterpiece in the repertoire for solo violin. I imagined it played on a modern violin but respecting the correct articulations from the baroque period.
Exploring in this way the repertoire, associating the sonorities with the indispensable rules of baroque interpretation, was another sort of journey, which pushes one forward... always moving, always walking.

Agnès Pyka

Reviews on... -> Radio Coteaux - Grey Panthers - Mediapart - Thierry Vagne - Audiophile magazine - Pizzicato - Utmisol - Classica

Johann Sebastian Bach - Partita 2 BWV 1004
Thierry de Mey - Passacaille et variations
Aram Khatchaturian - Sonate Monologue

    Agnès Pyka, violin

Recording made with the support of: