An artist compels in the Romantics but falls short in Bach
The Strad Issue: August 2024
Description: An artist compels in the Romantics but falls short in Bach
Musicians: Karl Stobbe (violin)
Works: Bach: Violin Partita no.1 in B minor BWV1002. Paganini: Caprices op.1 nos. 9, 17 and 24. Ysaÿe: Solo Sonata in E minor op.27 no.4
Catalogue number: LEAF LM294
Karl Stobbe used the musical world’s pandemic standstill to immerse himself in works for unaccompanied violin. This disc forms part of a six-album series of solo recordings, each built around one of Bach’s iconic Sonatas and Partitas. Stobbe is a formidable technician, displaying precise and dextrous left-hand fingerwork, but the combination of his muscular virtuosity and the close, reverberant recording results in a perceived lack of expressive subtlety.
His Bach is in the Romantic camp, sporting a full, opulent sound. He often plays fast and loose with the notated articulations, attacks multiple stopping aggressively, shuns the opportunity to ornament repeated sections and adopts a breakneck approach to the Corrente and its Double. Regrettably, too, Stobbe’s full-on performances lack the rhetorical freedom inherent in Bach’s stylised dances and his range of dynamic variation sounds limited.
Stobbe is much more persuasive in strongly projected accounts of three Paganini Caprices and Ysaÿe’s Fourth Sonata, revisiting the latter having recorded all six sonatas a decade ago. He surmounts most technical challenges with admirable panache; however, expressive directions – the dynamic contrasts in the Allemande and Finale of Ysaÿe’s sonata and the pianos for the theme and variations 2, 5 and 7 of Paganini’s 24th Caprice, for example – largely fail to register.
ROBIN STOWELL
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