Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession — whether of comic books, records or stamps — has evolved in the age of Spotify, Netflix and cloud computing. No activity defines current cultural trends better than binge-watching, completism taken to its logical extreme: art turned extreme sport.
It’s an attitude that has found a natural home in the concert hall and opera house (what is Wagner’s Ring Cycle, after all, if not the original box set?) where length has long been fetishised and endurance accepted. But just as new media has changed the way we make art, so new contexts have changed how we consume it. Do we listen differently to a performance of a single Brandenburg Concerto compared with a complete set of six? Does Bach’s B minor Violin Partita say something different in isolation than when framed by its five companion pieces?
It takes a brave violinist, and a rare one, to tackle the latter question. You can count the artists who have performed all six of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin in a single concert on the fingers of one hand, and still have digits to spare. To do it in youth and untroubled health is one thing; to attempt it at nearly 70 years old, after a prolonged ‘retirement’ from performance owing to injury as Kyung Wha Chung is currently doing, first in the UK and then America, is quite another.
Shifting her weight from foot to foot, Chung’s physicality signalled athlete as much as artist as she stood on the start-line of her Bach marathon. It’s an attitude characteristic of a performer whose career, and music-making, has something of the struggle about it.
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