Bach’s Chaconne from his violin partita in D minor.

It’s a song that was written around the time when Bach’s wife died, and if you listen hard enough, you can almost hear that it’s about her. It sounds like there are two voices, a low voice and high voice, who meet and fall in love with each other, and experience all the highs and lows of life and then are torn away from each other by death in the end. And it’s all done with just notes on a violin. And what’s more, it was written 300 years ago! It trips me out thinking about how somebody can write something so epic for a single instrument so long ago.

Jacsha Heifetz’s version of it is my favorite. Some people don’t like how fast he plays it, but he does the ending the best, in my opinion. You can hear the pain and denial and chaos of the two voices trying to enjoy their last moments together and leave nothing unsaid between each other most clearly the way Heifetz plays it.

Itzhak Perlman’s version is very good too. He plays at a slower pace than Heifetz, and has a more epic sounding tone. The highs and lows are generally more epic sounding the Heifetz, but I don’t quite understand how Perlman plays the ending. I have no doubt that he’s trying to tell the same story as Heifetz, but there isn’t any of that pain and chaos like Heifetz has. I’ve seen interviews with Perlman, and he seems like a very happy and well adjusted guy, so maybe that explains why his ending is so different. Maybe that’s just how the ending is for happy people like that, and I can’t comprehend it.

There are other good renditions to check out too, but Heifetz and Perlman are my favorites. Hillary Hahn and Nathan Milstein are other popular ones. Plus a bunch of others. That’s another cool thing about Chaconne. Everybody has their own rendition.