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Warner4
Where has my week gone? Much of it was spent plundering a coffin of one of the most captivating violinists that ever lived. David Oistrakh, Odessa born (thus Ukrainian-rather than Russian-Jewish), set the tone for violin playing in the Soviet era. Not just in his own performances but in those of his Moscow students who included Oleg Kagan, Gidon Kremer, Lydia Mordkovich, Nina Belina, Stoika Milanova, Rimma Sushanskaya and many more, not to mention his own distinguished son, Igor. Maintaining a distinctive individualism in an authoritarian state, he taught young musicians to find their own path to the variable meanings of a work of music. Sent on tour from the late 1950s, he was a revelation to western audiences, all too jaded by empty virtuosity.
The present compilation consists of commercial recordings for the late EMI label and radio tapes from the Russian archives. Some of the latter are almost unlistenable. A Tchaikovsky concerto from 1938 appears to have been recorded on sandpaper; it gets included because Oistrakh plays a passage that appears in no printed score – a personal inspiration that was swiftly taken up by everyone else. Any sonic discomfort is promptly eased by a 1954 Sérénade mélancolique, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin, in which Oistrakh’s humanity could melt the heart of the stoniest-faced apparatchik.
I won’t trouble you with half of what I’ve heard but there’s a Hindemith concerto to which Oistrakh gives the kiss of life, a flurry of Mozarts where he dances the night away and both Prokofiev concertos in which he is unassailable. The Beethoven triple concerto comes in two versions – the notorious one in Berlin with Richter, Rostropovich and Karajan, and a 1958 account, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the modest Lev Oborin and Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, a masterpiece of delicate communication.
Time after time, I hit the pause button to reflect upon the efficacy of EMI’s unsung-hero conductors – Alceo Galliera, Andre Cluytens, Jean Martinon, Nikolai Malko, Sixten Ehrling. There is so much to learn from these masters. And then there’s George Szell and Otto Klemperer, not to be missed in two widely differing approaches to the Brahms concerto.
I haven’t the space to discuss a dozen wonderfully obscure Soviet composers and a plethora of magnificent chamber music including the Schubert Octet … I guess that’s the rest of my holiday season gone and half of my present-giving budget, to boot. Never mind. Oistrakh, who died in 1974, lives on in this heavy box and the revelation is as gripping as ever.
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