In the main, Brian Brooks offers little to complement or compete either with the catalog’s best baroque violin versions of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas or with numerous “unoriginal-instrument” benchmarks. His effortful broken chords in the G minor and A minor Fugues, for example, are painful to hear, while melodic lines lose direction and momentum through seemingly arbitrary dynamic shifts in slower movements such as the B minor Partita’s Sarabande and the A minor Sonata’s Andante. To be sure, Brooks brings sturdy virtuosity and nicely varied articulation to the latter sonata’s concluding Allegro. I only wish the B minor Bourée and Doubles had danced with equal assertion. Collectors looking for period performances of these works will discover altogether higher levels of instrumental aplomb and stylish musicianship from Monica Huggett, Lucy van Dael, and Sigiswald Kuijken.
