Violinist Soovin Kim to Play Bach's Sonatas and Partitas

In the grim pandemic nadir of September 2020, violinist Soovin Kim stepped out on an empty stage at the New England Conservatory in Boston and performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. These six towering works from the late 1710s — three sonatas and three partitas — take two and a half hours to play straight through and encompass an encyclopedic range of technique and emotion. Chamber Music Northwest — the Portland, Ore., series of which Kim is co-artistic director — streamed a video recording of the concert to homebound audiences as a “gift.”

That remarkable gift is still available on YouTube, but a greater one is imminent. This weekend, Boston-based Kim, 48, will perform the Sonatas and Partitas at two concerts, one on Friday night and one on Sunday afternoon, at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Burlington. The concerts are an off-season offering from the summertime Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Colchester, which Kim founded and co-artistic directs. They give locals a rare chance to see one of the country’s most accomplished violinists perform a set of works that the late violinist George Enescu called “the Himalayas” for violinists.

“Not many people do solo Bach concerts,” Jody Woos said. As executive director of LCCMF from 2013 to 2021, Woos recalled organizing many fundraising house concerts in which Kim played movements of a sonata or partita. Performing them all, however, is “kind of a marathon,” she said.

“Just to stand and play one of them is an accomplishment,” said cellist Edward Arron, Kim’s friend of 30 years, who regularly plays at the LCCMF and Capital City Concerts in Montpelier. “Each partita and sonata is a monument. For someone to play all six of those in two days — that is an incredible feat of violin virtuosity, of physical and mental stamina.”

Each sonata has four movements that alternate between slow and fast. The second movement of each is a fugue, in which one phrase is taken up successively by distinct voices at set intervals — something that might seem inconceivable on one instrument. The violin is naturally single-voiced, but in Bach’s hands it becomes polyphonic, Kim explained.

The partitas are generally lighter explorations of dance-music forms, each with four to seven movements that range from stately sarabandes to minuets to lively jigs, aka gigues.

The exception is Partita No. 2 in D minor, of which the fifth and final movement is the Chaconne. Bach composed the famous movement around the time of his first wife’s death in childbirth. One hundred and fifty years after its composition, Johannes Brahms marveled of the 15-minute piece, “The Chaconne is for me one of the most wonderful, incomprehensible pieces of music. On a single staff, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings.”

For Kim, the Sonatas and Partitas are “profound,” and the Chaconne particularly so. Not only is it acknowledged as Bach’s greatest composition, he said, but “there are probably composers who would say it’s the greatest thing ever written, because on top of the content — life, death, heaven, earth, the afterlife — it’s done on one violin.”

The multiple voices of Bach’s polyphony show up in a staggering variety of ways: a melody with accompaniment, movements in which every voice is equally important, places where two voices interact with a third.

Yet, as the violinist observed, “we can’t play more than four notes at once. And when you’re playing multiple voices — chords — our hand is only so big; we can only extend so far.” Unlike a pianist, a violinist must often play a chord’s notes in quick succession rather than simultaneously.

The works’ complexity makes them “a heavier listen,” Kim admitted. But he advises audiences to focus on the emotion rather than the technique. “If people are aware of the difficulty, then I’m not doing my job,” he said. “It’s a bit like going to a restaurant and enjoying the food. It’s for the chef to figure out the difficulty. The people eating should have no idea how it was made.”

Bach transforms the violinist’s difficulty into graspable structures for the listener, Arron pointed out. The music is “utterly approachable,” he said, “because as one listens, one can … imagine the framework, the lines going up and down, when the music is developing and when it has returned to a familiar place.”

Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas are a constant presence in Kim’s life. As a faculty member at the New England Conservatory and visiting professor at Yale University, Kim said, “I hear some solo violin Bach most days of the year, whether it’s me or my students.” The works are peaks that every violinist must scale in training, and they must play selections at every major conservatory audition and competition — including the International Violin Competition “Premio Paganini” in Genoa, Italy, which Kim won in 1996 at the age of 20.

Kim recorded the Sonatas and Partitas a decade ago, though he has yet to fine-tune and release the album, he said. Time brings more maturity to the performance of these pieces, said Arron, who plays Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello, composed around the same time as the solo violin works. “We learn them as stepping stones, technically and musically, and as we get older and wiser, we continue to find deeper meaning in these pieces.”

Kim concurred. “They take us to the furthest corners of life experience,” he said. “I’ve played them in living rooms and on stages and in the Grand Canyon for no one: I walked down a little ways and played them. They will be some of the last music left on earth, that’s for certain.”

“They’re perfect pieces of music,” Arron added. “How many things in this world can you say are perfect?”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Polyphonic Paradise | Violinist Soovin Kim offers a rare solo concert of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas”