Bach-Busoni: Chaconne in D minor (Margulis, Kissin, Larrocha, Rösel, Weissenberg, Ginzburg)

Among the chaconnes (and passacaglias) of the period, the one from Bach’s Violin Partita No.2 is pretty unusual. There’s bare fact of its sheer scale – it was the longest single movement ever written for solo violin when published – but that if anything obscures what makes it such a fascinating work. The Chaconne is a set of variations on a descending tetrachord (D-C-Bb-A), itself a well-established schema, but the harmony is varied so aggressively that for large sections of the work it can be hard figuring out what exactly Bach is varying. (Compare the last of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas or Pachelbel’s Fm Chaconne, which use the same descending tetrachord in a much more direct way. By a conservative count there are eight variants of the tetrachord in this work.) As with the Goldbergs, Bach structures the 64 variations (65 in Busoni’s version) in a telescoped way. From a birds-eye view the work is a simple A-B-C, with the major-key middle section featuring a chorale. Within this structure, variations a