Violinist Viktoria Mullova's Top 5 Tips for Playing Bach

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On a typical day, the tracks Viktoria Mullova shuffles on her iPod will include Bach and Handel, Gypsy music, Radiohead, and Portuguese guitar music. While her broad embrace of diverse musical forms is well known, those choices are particularly revealing because the seemingly disparate tracks share a characteristic that's central to her personality: they're emotional, but not sentimental.

In retrospect, it's hardly surprising that over the last 15 years, this Russian violinist's choice of repertoire has changed significantly. Having dispensed with many large-scale, romantic concertos (she's on record as saying that the rewards of playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto amount to less than its demands on her), Mullova is better known these days as a Baroque soloist. Bach's music has been a constant in her musical life, but until recently, it often presented her with problems.

"I've always liked it, but I didn't much like my playing of it," she says.

"It was difficult technically, and I struggled with it. Then, in the early 1990s, I started to listen to other interpreters—conductors, singers, cellists—performing Baroque works. Not many of them were violinists, because there wasn't one recording of Bach's solo violin music that I really admired."

There followed a long period of developing a performance style that satisfied her—the latest results can be heard in her recent Onyx Classical recording of the solo Sonatas and Partitas, BWV 1001–06.

Her technical advice about playing Bach is distilled below, but Mullova is keen to emphasise that her approach is intuitive and no more "authentic" than any other—it's simply what feels right for her at that moment. "That's the beauty of Bach: it can be played in many different ways," she says. "I don't believe in this 'authentic performance' thing—I'm just enthusiastic to figure out the best way to play the music, and how I like it to sound."

In the very personal liner notes for the new Bach recording, she writes that it marks "a significant milestone on a never-ending journey. . . . I am aware that continuing to play and study the works of Bach's genius is an endless process of exploration."

I ask whether it's also linked to her growing older, turning 50 this year.

"Yes, probably—I mention in the notes that it became like a meditative process for me. In my 30s, I was running around like crazy, and was very, very stressed. Later I started to realize that life is going by so quickly, and I wanted to stop and enjoy every moment.

"For me, playing music is partly about living those moments in a better way."

Here are her Top 5 tips:

1. Use a Baroque Bow

"This is the most important advice I can give. It's absolutely necessary—definitely more important than changing to gut strings—because it will make you understand how Bach's music should be played. It's what made me change my playing.

"Bach wrote for a Baroque bow, and it's very difficult to play the chords and articulate the notes correctly with a modern one, which is much longer. When I changed to a Baroque bow, everything fell into place, technically. Strangely enough, it feels as if you have more bow, even though it's only about two-thirds the length of a modern one; it seems to give more space, and you can hold notes for longer. I don't know how this happens—it's a paradox. Maybe you just use it in a different way.

"It doesn't have to be an antique bow—I use a 'modern' Baroque one—and you can buy one without spending a lot of money."

2. Change to Gut Strings

"Recently, I was practicing a piano trio by Haydn for a performance on gut strings with fortepiano, and as I didn't have my Guadagnini with me I tried to learn it on the Strad with metal strings. It sounded really awkward, and I didn't enjoy it. Today, I continued on the Guadagnini with gut strings, and it was so much easier to play."

3. Lower the Pitch

"Next, lower your pitch to [A]415, because this will free the sound by allowing more air into it. It's difficult to explain in words, but the sound will be rounder and easier to produce. I've never tried 415 on metal strings, so I don't know whether it's actually possible (someone told me that Bach was originally played even lower—at 390)."

4. Rethink Intonation

"I was taught that intonation means playing in or out of tune, and so all my life I've tried to check every note with an open string to find out whether it's in tune. But with Bach I struggled, and I couldn't understand why the sound wasn't ringing. I've since learned that in Bach all the tonalities come from the harpsichord, and that sometimes this used to be tuned in such a way that important chords were absolutely in tune while others were absolutely out of tune. But your ears adjust, and then it becomes very expressive. So now, for violin music of certain tonalities, I tune my instrument in a different way—not like I would usually do, in perfect fifths. This all came from trying out things and exploring."

5. Use Color

"You can't phrase Bach as you would Tchaikovsky or Brahms, but this doesn't mean that you shouldn't use vibrato at all. There should be lots of variety in how you play. Articulation is also very important because this, too, affects the color. I remember my teacher at the academy telling me that Bach should be played in a single line with continuous vibrato, sounding like an organ, and I took this very seriously—on my first Bach recording I played in long, long lines without any pauses for 'breath.' In fact, it should sound more like a harpsichord, played more as you imagine you'd speak. When we speak, we use intonation, and depending on what we want to say and how we want to say it, our intonation changes. We should do the same when playing Bach."

Mullova: the Power of Bach

"What's fascinating is that it can seem like you know Bach, yet you keep discovering new things. I sometimes get bored with pieces such as the Brahms and Beethoven sonatas, and the reason is that they always sound more or less the same; but although I play Bach all the time, I'm never bored of it because it's always changing. And his is the most intimate music, the closest to the person who's performing it. It has lots of tender moments, also fiery ones, and lots of dance. And because those emotions are close to me, I live through his music."