This is a real swan-song: Oleg Kagan made these recordings from live performances given at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in the spring of 1989, just a few months before his death from cancer at the age of 43. This exceptionally fine, un-self-seeking artist was a pupil of David Oistrakh, recital partner of Sviatoslav Richter and of his wife, Natalia Gutman, and dedicatee of Schnittke.
Time was running out, yet Kagan plays these Partitas and Sonatas as if there were all the time in the world. The Adagio of Sonata No. 1 in G minor stretches out into the wide harmonic distance, with a fine, bright line creating lightly suspended sequences and mercurial patterns of figuration. There are times when the bow merely breathes across the strings, as in the Andante of the Second Sonata, moments when it seems barely to touch them at all, as in the Gigue of the Second Partita.
This D minor Partita's Allemande conveys a sense of striving to re-create the even strength of its musical architecture. The most contrapuntally weighty of the pieces, the A minor Sonata and the E major Partita, are centrally placed, their depths of harmonic and dynamic vision glowing out. The order is not that in Bach's autograph score: starting with the First Sonata, the pieces here reach upward, a fifth apart, in a chain of harmonic resonance, to the final solemn and exultant C major Sonata. A revelatory set.'