It would have been Ida Haendel’s birthday this week. The prodigious violinist showed me three different birth certificates but all agreed on December 15, and we think she would have turned 100 last year. No-one alive today plays like her.
Raised in Warsaw Ida studied in London and settled in Montreal and Miami. Among fellow-violinists, she revered Jascha Heifetz and adopted his signature concertos – Sibelius and Walton – albeit with very different interpretations. There was a warmth, and wit, in Ida that Heifetz could never attain.
The double-album under review contains four of her warhorse concertos performed with the BBC and London symphony orchestras. Heifetz had retrieved the Sibelius concerto from three decades of neglect, but Ida was the soloist who humanised it. Her late 1981 performance in the Royal Albert Hall, with Paavo Berglund conducting, is larger and grander than the norm, a summery breeze through a landscape generally perceived as icy. Unquestionably great Sibelius.
An account of the Elgar concerto with Sir Adrian Boult reminds us that this work was contemporary with the Sibelius, though looking backwards where the Finn stared resolutely ahead. Ida’s Brahms, conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, is serenity incarnate.
The pick of this pack is the Britten concerto, premiered in New York in 1940 while steeped in the land Britten had left behind. Ida gives weight to this underrated concerto, adding an emotional dimension with an arresting clamp on our affections, especially in the closing Passacaglia. Andrew Davis, much missed, conducted with brio. Ida played, her way, never less than beautiful.
