Mischa Elman enjoyed some triumphs during 1966. He
had been his usual spirited and combustible self in interviews, lambasting
ugly concert halls, academic violin playing and cosy relationships between
record companies, soloists and orchestras who sought to promote their
own interests. But critics, who once routinely scoffed at the supposedly
dinosauric posturing of the seventy-six year old veteran, now tempered
their strictures with a wistful admiration; his baroque and classical
stylistic impulses may be unacceptable but there was, to them, a nobility
that coursed through his playing still. An era in which it mattered
much less what was played than who was playing it, was coming to an
end.
In October that year Elman went to the Vanguard studios
in New York, with his accompanist of fifteen years, Joseph Seiger, to
make what proved to be his last recordings. It was a successor to his
Jubilee Album, which had been something of a success. He recorded ten
pieces from his repertoire, in the main a wide-ranging selection of
late Romantic and twentieth century pieces, variously lissom, ethereal,
full of panache and virtuosity. In truth though, Elman’s fires had slacked
long before. His left hand had ceased to be as mobile as it once had
been, causing ruptures rhythmically and causing his interpretations,
never the fleetest anyway, to slow inordinately as a result. His right
arm, once one of the wonders of the violinistic world, was also simply
incapable of reproducing the miracles of his youth when, for a brief
period, no more than a decade, he had been one of the world’s indisputably
stellar musicians.
In the Kreisler confection
on Dvořák’s themes, the Slavonic Fantasie, the fatally slackening
left hand and the diminishment of his tonal lustre, that once
volcanic throb, are all too prominently audible. There are however things
still to savour, along with the inevitable signs of violinistic and
motoric decay. He is subtle and manages to maintain a reasonable line
in the Debussy whilst in the Gluck, arranged by Ries, though there is
some thinning tone, occasionally strained, it is so romantically and
vocally phrased, so expressive and with such a characteristically quick
and unmistakable Elman slide, that it’s worth listening to his playing
simply to apprehend the use to which he puts melodic contours. In the
Smetana he simply can’t compete with younger, faster, more virtuosic
violinists. It’s slow and laboured and though affectionate the lyric
intensity he would, forty years earlier, have vested in the piece is
pretty much gone. In the Faure there is nothing of Thibaud’s fleetness
and eroticism, nothing of the Frenchman’s suavity either; Elman is much
more stolid, taking an inordinate amount of time to spin the Berceuse
to a conclusion. In Kreisler’s La Precieuse there are some quirky slides
and rather heavily emphatic playing and in the Espejo, though engaging,
we can hear the slackening of the violinist’s lower strings.
The LP was issued in the spring of 1967, posthumously.
Elman has passed into violinistic history but not, thankfully, discographic
history. One could hardly recommend this CD reissue for its intrinsic
virtues. It’s a study in decline, the Last Testament of a once great
individualist. But to those who appreciate such things and can listen
beyond the frailties there is still a compelling nobility of utterance
to his playing and we can hear haunting the disc the ghostly patina
of his youthful genius.
Jonathan Woolf
Mischa Elman, violin