Soloists are lonely people. They practice alone and then play alone on stage again, where they present the results of their loneliness studies to a large audience. But this is paradoxical, since loneliness and sociability are mutually exclusive. But artist loneliness, first of all, is not necessarily a depressive affair. And secondly, an artist wants to bring everything, but also really everything, that he produces in front of an audience. It has already done so. As a romantic, he has nothing to do with the strict and stupid study of music in a barren apartment. He goes out into nature with his violin and hears hunting music in the distance, the horns pound happily to the slaughter of the animal world, also a paradox. Paganini imitates the hunting horns on his violin. Then he remembers the night before in the pub, a somber pounding dance. But he quickly returns to his hunting music and lets sounds dance and sprinkle like will-o’-the-wisps, then the hunting music plays again at the end.
The whole thing is a whim, in Italian: capriccio. Paganini published twenty-four such whims 200 years ago; they mark the beginning of modernism in music. Nothing learned, nothing backward-looking, nothing unpopular can be found here. The self-determined person who pushes into the future dominates everywhere, makes himself the measure of all things and his violin into a high-performance machine that rapidly produces sounds.
Also Sergey Malov is a grand prince of solitude. The Petersburg-born violinist likes to be a little different from his colleagues. He has already demonstrated this with Johann Sebastian Bach, whose cello suites he quickly recorded on the cello da spalla, a giant violin pressed against the shoulder. Now, of course, he has arrived at the Paganini Capricci, which he plays as wild improvisations in a village square (Sergey Malov: “Paganini – 24 Capricci Op.1” published by Solo Musica). Everything seems to be the whim of a moment, and Malov keeps adding a few notes. This is how Malov turns these madnesses into unrestrained hymns to life.