Tetzlaff sounds like a quartet in Bach recital

Christian Tetzlaff is a product of our time.

Boyishly professorial, the violinist hails from Germany but studied in America. Born in 1966, he has processed the golden age’s romantic soloists and today’s historically informed ideologues and emerged innovative. He plays with soft-spoken wit, unafraid to end statements with cheeky question marks. His lean sounds narrate our culture wars but never fall victim to them.

All of which served him well Sunday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, where he played four of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin.

Bach’s works are -- no surprise -- a rite of passage for every fiddler. Each is a unique polyphonic world, a harmonic map to a distinct emotional universe written for an instrument traditionally used to sing one soprano line.

Tetzlaff was meant to play them. Despite detailed articulations and powerfully directed phrases, he didn’t micromanage the works; he sculpted them into oratorical paragraphs. An organic musician with exceptional bow-pressure sensitivity, he turned challenging chords -- clusters that can sound harshly vertical -- into blossoming introductions to vocal lines.

More impressive, he played the music’s silences. While he barreled through fast movements, he let the scores breathe naturally. It was a successfully egoless performance: Bach came alive.

Smartly, Tetzlaff focused on the second and third sonatas and partitas; the first of each set is too grandiose for a two-hour show. His choice also spotlighted Bach’s most entertaining movements: the fugues and slow tunes as well as the D-minor Chaconne and E-major Preludio. Thankfully, Tetzlaff didn’t render these as hit singles; he began many succeeding chapters without waiting for mid-work applause to end. (At one point, he also asked listeners to cover their coughs; he could have asked for this “favor” with more poise, but the crowd could have also been less free with its phlegm.)

Tetzlaff wasn’t spot on; he struggled with intonation in his first work, the A-minor Sonata, and at various points throughout. But he came through when it mattered. His improvisatory Chaconne, sparked by kaleidoscopic arpeggios and extreme textural contrasts, was worthy of a fresh recording. Likewise his breezy, pure slow movements: Here, he accompanied himself sensitively to advance the German ideal of long-line singing and seamless transitions.

Most of the night, his singular violin embodied a four-voice boys choir. Only rarely did he sound like one musician. And by the end of the show, many listeners who had once thought Bach challenging to play most likely went home with the illusion that they had been terribly wrong.