Five Times for Violin - archaic, aphoristic messages from human life, fascinating memory fragments of distant children's songs, laments, also of Johann Sebastian Bach's wonderful Andante from Sonata II in A minor BWV 1003. Boris Yoffe's "Times" are timeless and therefore they are contemporary: they unfold their very own universe of outrageous sound magic beyond all questions about any alleged modernity. Here and now, with sleepwalking self-evidence, they combine, revive the achievements of past centuries of Western music.
In extremely reduced space of one and two voices, they create highly poignant plots in which moments of silence evoke individual associations in the listener. A dissonant-expressive upsurge opens the cycle - in the 4th piece this powerful gesture collapses: what is left in the end? Unsolved questions, riddles, tensions thrown back into themselves - and in the middle of the cycle (No. 3) the only enlightening, relieving cadence with subtle reminiscence of Bach's Andante...
In his "Fünf Zeiten" Boris Yoffe creates music the fragile poetry of which with its smallest gestures on the edge of silence characterizes him as the spiritual heir of the great Jewish composer Mordecai Seter.

Kolja Lessing,
October 2022