Paganini: 24 Caprices, Op. 1
Janusz Wawrowski, violin. (Accord)
It’s taken a long time for Paganini’s 24 Caprices, Op. 1, to take their place alongside such staples of the solo string player’s repertoire as Bach’s suites, but now, almost suddenly, that’s how they’re regarded in some enlightened circles.
Premiered in 1831 when Paganini made his debut in Paris, they constitute 80 minutes of paroxysm and glory that only someone who had a casino in Paris named after him could encompass, embrace, and enlarge. Their continuing relevance was recently affirmed by the Wihan Quartet’s recording of William Zinn’s arrangement, as well as recent recordings by James Ehnes, Thomas Zehetmair, and Julia Fischer.
The Polish violin virtuoso Janusz Wawrowski brings a unique passion to this music. This season he is touring a multi-media production called Ultimate Paganini with cellist Marcin Zdunik (with whom he has made a DVD of the Caprices) and “audio-visual instrumentalist” Maciej Walczak.
Wawrowski has the true musician’s concern for the structural and dramatic truth behind Paganini’s torrents of notes and plays his modern Wojciech Topa–made violin with a bulletproof technique that yields countless insights and beauties.
There have been so many recordings of the complete Caprices recently that it has become a sort of a given that there be some kind of conceptual framework.
In this case, it is supplied abundantly by music writer Marcin Majchrowski’s absorbing liner notes, which raise many significant questions and suggest many possibilities, both of the intrinsic importance of the music and its impact on its own generation and generations since, not least to Witold Lutoslawski.
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