The score never says what this piece means, but the music makes it hard not to hear mourning, because it behaves the way mourning behaves. A chaconne is grief given procedure: a short harmonic ground stated and then restated in dozens of variations that never repeat themselves, the same loss walked again and again, each pass finding something different to say about it. On one violin the exercise is solitary and enormous at once — a single bow carrying bass line, harmony, and song, the double-stops thickening one voice into a small congregation.

The turn to major near the center is the hinge: not consolation exactly, but memory returning in brightness, warm and unguarded, before the minor returns and the opening statement comes back carrying everything heard since. On a single staff, for a small instrument, the recording seems to open a whole world. The final chord is simply allowed to ring out and decay. The ground never resolves the grief; repetition is how the piece keeps walking through it.