Bartosz Woroch - Dancer on a Tightrope

The Guardian 100

Woroch/Foo
(Champs Hill)

This 20th-century programme from the UK-based Polish violinist Bartosz Woroch is full of intriguing repertoire. It starts with Grażyna Bacewicz’s 1924 Solo Sonata No 2, a fierce and brilliant piece, powerfully played. At its centre is the title track, a 1993 work by Sofia Gubaidulina in which Bartosz’s violin stretches and pirouettes, yearning for flight; underneath, the piano offers a kind of safety net, its strings at first set eerily vibrating from within the instrument using a glass tumbler, then more conventionally played. Mei Yi Foo supplies this and the insistent, disembodied-sounding keyboard part in John Cage’s eerie Six Melodies. In between there are two more solo sonatas, Hindemith’s Op 31 No 2 and Prokofiev’s Op 115, and Schnittke’s Fuga for Solo Violin. Everything is played with a focused intensity and a sense of risk-taking that make for compulsive listening.