Bach has become, increasingly, the pinnacle of the secular religious experience. On Sunday afternoon at the Phillips Collection, the luminous violinist Isabelle Faust offered a compact, 1¼ -hour chunk of pure Bach, mainlined to the ears and bloodstreams of a roomful of worshipers — or rather, listeners, but at a performance like this, it amounts to much the same thing.
There's a vulnerability to a solo instrumentalist, standing alone before a crowd, facing the music, literally, which Faust had mounted on largish sheets of poster board, emphasizing their kinship to sacred texts. Faust — who had to cancel her last scheduled performance here in 2015 because of illness — underlined the vulnerability with the humanity of her approach. Some soloists in Bach aim for a machine-like precision, creating the effect of perpetual motion as the notes click by. Faust, by contrast, was perfectly precise but wholly organic. Her sound had the complexity not of a machine's cogs but of the jagged edge of a plant's leaf, perfectly formed yet subject to natural forces — tugs at individual phrases, like gentle breezes, distinguishing one statement from another without a pause in velocity.
The program, performed without intermission, consisted of the third and second partitas divided by the third sonata, enabling the listener to zoom in with a microscope’s focus on the richness and variety within a concentrated sound world. The third partita contains some of Bach’s most familiar, even iconic tunes, starting with the opening Prelude, which Faust played with a buoyancy that caressed the music with a gentle, opening touch. Faust holds her bow, Baroque style, partway up the stick, and the resulting velocity and quickness of response helped the music dance like flecks of light across water.
That, though, is too arty a description for a performance that was stripped of artifice but was, rather, a simple act of homage and adoration. The sonata created a formal contrast to the partitas by visiting the realm of the fugue, though it was already clear that Faust could make her Stradivarius sing with many voices, from its throaty lower register to its artless amber-colored top.
We ask, often, whether music is “relevant,” and the comparison to religious texts points to the way ancient statements are interpreted through a filter of the now. Certainly the second partita sounded startlingly contemporary, exploring the edges of tonality so that every chord appeared to be touching on some essential perceptual limit. The piece finishes with the towering Chaconne, widely accounted as one of the great texts of the canon, whose very name invokes a kind of reverential awe among acolytes. Faust, rather than inflicting a capital-I Interpretation on any of this, illuminated it from within. But there was one element of topical subversion, arguably, in her interpretation: Through celebrating the greatness and mystery of music, she also demonstrated the power of a single woman.
