JULIA FISHER - Paganini: 24 Caprices (2010)
A beautiful performance, clean, faithful to the composer. The problem, though—while listening to classical music—is something that works similarly to imprinting in ethology, where an animal forms a lasting (behavioral) bond with a particular stimulus: once you discover and listen to one performance, you experience the others as a kind of “betrayal” compared to the memory you have of that first experience.
And the theory continues: imprinting is a learning mechanism at a sensitive (early developmental) stage, during which an individual forms a lasting attachment to an object. And for me, that object is the 24 Caprices played by Salvatore Accardo in 1980. I favor his style of interpretation; it’s the version that truly “feels like home.”