On To Be Sung on the Water the American violinist Michelle Makarski sets three late solo sonatas by Giuseppe Tartini beside two pieces that Donald Crockett wrote for her. The Tartini works are rarely heard: Makarski found them by chance and plays them as pure solo music, without the optional bass lines. The result is an unaccompanied recital in which the eighteenth century and the late twentieth answer each other.
The album followed Makarski's earlier ECM New Series recital Elogio per un'ombra by six years and reverses its perspective, with Tartini now at the centre. It was recorded in March 2004 at Radio Studio DRS in Zürich, with Stephan Schellmann as Tonmeister and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. In the title piece she is joined by the violist Ronald Copes, her husband and a member of the Juilliard String Quartet. The composer Steven Stucky wrote the booklet essay.
Tartini's late sonatas are more inward than his famous Devil's Trill, built on single melodic lines with little double-stopping, and Tartini himself called the continuo parts a concession to convention. Makarski plays the A major, D minor and B minor sonatas, each split into short movements and placed around the Crockett pieces. The title duo for violin and viola dates from the late 1980s and takes its name from a 1779 poem by Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg, Auf dem Wasser zu singen. Stucky hears its open fifths echoed in the D minor sonata. Mickey Finn (1996), for violin alone, is restless in harmony yet meditative in pace.
Reviewers responded to the pairing as much as to the playing. Julian Haylock made it a The Strad Selection and called the record "a conceptual and artistic triumph". In Strings, Edith Eisler wrote: "This is an extraordinarily beautiful recording." Gary Higginson, on MusicWeb International in 2006, found it superbly played and beautifully recorded, and suggested hearing the 53 minutes of solo strings in pairs, one sonata and one Crockett piece at a time.
This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1871, first released in 2006. The booklet reproduces the opening of the A major sonata from Tartini's autograph, held at the Veneranda Arca di S. Antonio in Padua.
