Manon de Boer
Manon de Boer (b. 1966, Kodaikanal, India) invited the violinist George van Dam to perform, in front of a camera, the Presto movement from the Sonata for Solo Violin Sz. 117 (1944) by Béla Bartók, reputed for its difficulty of execution, producing no less than six different recordings of the performance. Inspired by contemporary technologies used in the record industry, which aims at “perfect” sound, the artist asked the musician to choose the best performances of each passage from the six recordings, in order to reconstitute an ideal version of the piece. The video is the result of this composite version. While the sound corresponds to the perfectly executed sonata, the image, which is also composed of the fragments of the different recordings, allows the cuts to appear. The work visualises the constructed nature of this sound perfection, reconstituting both the difficulties and the tensions of the violinist’s rendition.