Opinion: Solo exploring

I have a confession to make: I am not a great fan of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. Of course, I know them well and have studied them extensively, but I don’t play them often and I don’t automatically teach them to my students. This is not to say that they aren’t great pieces – they are. But my reluctance exists because there is so much other great solo violin repertoire that is continually overlooked. In the pedagogical world I have listened to many students struggle through a Bach fugue, only to wonder whether it would be better for them to play a Tartini solo sonata, or Telemann’s equally wonderful and almost always ignored 12 Fantasies.

If we’re asked to name the best solo violin compositions for study and performance, the same works come up again and again – Paganini’s Caprices, Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for solo violin, and probably Wieniawski’s Etudes-Caprices op.10 – but that’s about as far as it goes. How likely is it that you would find the wonderful Sonatina pastorale for violin solo op.383 by Darius Milhaud in a student’s case?