AVAILABILITY
www.symposiumrecords.co.uk
The
meteoric career of Ossy Renardy and its tragic denouement could
stand as a paradigm of gilded youth, silenced. Born Oskar Reiss
in Vienna in 1920 a peripatetic, essentially untutored, boyhood
career saw him starring in variety shows alongside showmen and
strongmen until, like the Czech virtuoso Příhoda, he was
discovered in Italy and a career was launched. He made a New York
debut at the age of eighteen and in anticipation of the centenary
of Paganini’s death he played the 24 Caprices at Carnegie Hall.
The impact must have been substantial because the following year
he was asked to record them, the first integral set ever committed
to disc, albeit in David’s anachronistic piano accompanied version.
From then his career was American based and after war service
he resumed touring in 1947. He died in a car crash in 1953 having
shortly before re-recorded the Caprices. His pianist in the earlier
recording and steadfast accompanist Walter Robert survived the
crash. [see footnote]
The
focus of Symposium’s disc, rightly,
is the 1940 set of the Caprices. Predating
Ricci’s recording of them, the Renardy
has a few nips and tucks in addition
to the skeletal piano part – some repeats
are omitted, and a number of very small
cuts are made. In comparison with Ricci’s
febrile playing and his daredevil persona
Renardy is very much more elegant and
Viennese and much less inclined to emotive
and tonal volatility. The technique
is not transcendental but it is certainly
astonishing enough; and nothing is for
show with Renardy lavishing great care
and affection on them. There is not
much to choose between this transfer
and that by Biddulph a decade ago on
their double CD tribute to Renardy.
Maybe the Symposium has rather more
surface noise but it sounds bright nevertheless.
That
Biddulph disc, which I assume will be
reintroduced to the market as the label
gets into reissuing its back catalogue,
also contained the Zarzycki, Ernst and
Dvořák as well as Saint-Saëns’
first Violin Concerto in piano reduction
form. Symposium includes a fine Corelli
Sonata. Elsewhere he is dashing in the
Zarzycki, not quite tonally adept enough
in the Dvořák, and though convincing
in the Ernst does tend to thinness –
that intense vibrato and piquant playing
and the devilishly good pizzicati can’t
quite efface a lack of sophistication
in vibrato usage. There is a definite
change in recording quality in the two
Sarasate morceaux which sound decidedly
less good as recordings but are played
with cavalier bravado.
The
notes are useful and full matrix details
are given but not issue numbers or recording
dates. Brief as his career was and circumscribed
though it necessarily had to be Renardy’s
is a name that, like Hassid’s or Weisbord’s
or Hochstein’s will always be tinged
with a sense of loss and of promise
unfulfilled.
Jonathan
Woolf
Hello ~
I was delighted to come across a Symposium recording of performances
by Ossy Renardy (Great Violinists series, Vol. XVIII) listed on
MusicWeb International (2003) , complete with a review by Jonathan
Woolf: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/dec03/renardy.htm
Renardy (b. Oskar Reiss) was a remarkable violinist who is much
too infrequently heard today. I'm so pleased that a sampling of
his art is still available. I bought the old Biddulph transfer
on 33rpm many years ago and gave it to my friend and mentor Walter
Robert, who was Renardy's collaborator on many selections. Walter
was delighted--he wasn't even aware that those early recordings
had been reissued. I will probably buy the Symposium CD for myself,
not only for Renardy's playing but also as a memento of the playing
of Mr. Robert, who has since passed on.
I do not know if you are in contact with Mr. Woolf, whose review
you feature, but if you are, I would respectfully request that
you pass this message on to him so he can correct certain misinformation
contained in it. It's absolutely true, as Woolf notes, that Walter
Robert was Renardy's "steadfast accompanist", especially
from about 1937-41. Renardy made quite a number of recordings
for the Columbia and RCA-Victor labels with W. Robert (see the
link below): http://www.soundfountain.org/rem/remrenardy.html
and if I'm not mistaken, the two played many concerts together
through the old Columbia Community Series. It is also true that
Renardy, the first violinist to record the 24 Paganini Caprices
in an integral set, died tragically in a car crash in Dec. of
1953 at the young age of 33.
However , when Woolf writes that Renardy's "accompanist
Walter Robert survived the crash", he not only misstates
the facts, he perpetuates a misconception that has lingered on
for 60 years. The pianist who was with Renardy, and was in fact
driving the car when it crashed, was not Walter Robert (real name
Robert Walter Spitz, b. 1908 Trieste, d. 1999 Bloomington IN),
who took a post at the Univ. of North TX shortly after the war
and then from ca. 1947-1975 was a mainstay of the artist piano
faculty at the Indiana University School of Music. It was George
Robert (b. 1919 Vienna, d. 2006 Albuquerque NM), professor of
music at the University of NM and Renardy's accompanist of the
moment.
Renardy and Geo. Robert had given a concert in Las Cruces, N.M.
and were driving to their next engagement in Colorado; they never
made it out of NM. The accident at Tres Piedras.
I submit for your perusal this account of the incident by Ross
Rarmenter, from the 1953-54 archives of the New York Times (sorry
I do not have the complete reference, found it on a violin website):
"Perhaps the saddest happening in the musical world during
the local news stoppage was the death of Ossy Renardy, 33-year-old
violinist, who was killed in an automobile accident the afternoon
of Dec. 3. The accident occurred in northern New Mexico while
George Robert, the violinist's accompianist, was driving him to
a concert that night in Monte Vista, Colo. Their car skidded on
an ice slick and, while out of control, was hit by another car
coming in the opposite direction. The other motorists were not
seriously injured, and the violinist's Guarnerius was not damaged.
But many, knowing how fine an artist the young Viennese-born musician
was, must feel so great a talent could be less well spared than
even so precious an instrument."
In 1955 Renardy's splendid Guarneri was acquired by collector
Henri Hottinger, who sold it a decade later to Rembert Wurlitzer
Inc.. Subsequently it passed to Dr. Ephraim Engleman, and then
in 1976 to David Fulton. Fulton sold it in 2007 to an anonymous
Australian buyer for $7 million US. Renardy would seem to have
been the last artist who played it regularly in concert until
it's current owner (allegedly a very wealthy businessman), loaned
it long-term to Richard Tognetti, concertmaster of the Australian
Chamber Orchestra. The A.C.O. has been the beneficiary of three
exceptional instruments lent to it long-term by patrons of the
arts, the others being a 1759 Guadagnini violin and a 1729 'cello
by Giuseppe Guarneri filius Andreae.
Walter Robert, Ossy Renardy's "regular" pianist, was
a truly remarkable man, musician and mentor. He was a performer
of some stature in his younger years, partnering not only with
Renardy, Josef Gingold. Jaime Laredo, Fredell Lack and other violinists,
but also with a bunch of Metropolitan Opera stars of yesteryear
who toured on the old Columbia community concert circuit. For
sev. summers in the 40s he was also the official staff accompanist
for Galamian's summer course at Meadowmount, where he performed
with Michael Rabin, Laredo, James Buswell and other young prodigies
whose careers would soon take off.
Robert was an outstanding teacher, and one of the most erudite
musicians I ever met. He had an amazing gift for languages and
a wicked wit, which he turned on himself as often as on others.
Having been born in Trieste when it was still the major port of
the Habsburg Empire, he had a perfect command of Italian and German
from youth (he and violinist Franco Gulli, another Triestine who
found his way to I.U., had a habit of lifting a glass to Kaiser
Franz Josef each year on the Emperor's birthday); he had near-native
fluency in English and a good command of both French and Russian.
(Russian he learned in his fifties, "so I could read Dostoevsky
in the original"). In the course of his long career he held
guest professorships at the Florence, Bologna and Naples conservatories,
at Tunghi University (Taipei) and at his alma mater, the Vienna
Hochschule. He singlehandedly designed IU's D.M./Piano Pedagogy--one
of the first (and hardest!) piano pedagogy doctorates in the country--and
taught many of its required courses though he himself didn't have
a doctorate. That brings me to a little example of his wit: he
and I were walking down the Music School hallway one day when
he was buttonholed by a student who needed a signature from him.
The student came running up, calling "Dr. Robert, Dr. Robert!"
Walter turned around with a grin and quipped: "I don't play
that badly." :)
Unlike many performers of his day, W. Robert received a very
solid academic formation as a youth alongside his piano studies.
He attended a prestigious gymnasium (secondary school) and already
had 9 yrs. of Latin and 8 yrs. of Greek under his belt before
entering the Vienna Hochschule für Musik. Although he was
a brilliant music student and won the Bösendorfer Prize (the
award in those days being a Bösendorfer grand!), he retained
a lifelong love of classical languages. One of his first publications
after emigrating to the US was a translation into English of Rene
Descartes' Compendium musicae. The moment he retired from the
Music School, he started enrolling in classes. At 70+ he earned
an M.A. in Classical Studies from I.U. alongside students a third
his age.
When he came to Bloomington in the late 40s, IU was not the
world-class school it has since become. In in those early years
he taught not only piano but piano lit., general music lit., chamber
music, teaching methods, whatever they needed. One year he was
even drafted into teaching history--not music history, world history.
:) By the time I met him around 1973, he wasn't playing many solo
recitals. He suffered intermittently from pretty bad stage fright
when performing solo. Sometimes he played like an angel, while
other times his recitals were marred by memory slips. I have no
idea whether performance anxiety was always an issue with him.
I think not. In the early years of his tenure at IU he performed
many solo recitals, and was a fairly adventurous programmer, giving
the "Indiana premiere" of sev. dozen compositions including
works by Hindemith, Krenek, Bernhard Heiden, Elliott Carter and
many others. He gave the IN premiere of the Bartok Sonata for
Two Pianos and Percussion with pianist/composer Alfonso Montecino
and percussionists George Gabor and Richard Johnson; I would imagine
he performed that work with music, LOL. But Walter steadfastly
refused to use the music when playing solo repertoire. I think
that was a generational thing: for many of his era (Richter being
a notable exception), playing by memory in solo performances was
a "point of honor"--and non-negotiable.
By the late 60s, most of Robert's performances on and off campus
were as duo partner to legendary violinist and pedagogue Josef
Gingold, who in 1960 had been lured to IU from his position as
concertmaster of the Cleveland Orch. under Szell, or in trio with
Gingold and 'cellist Fritz Magg. He was a fabulous accompanist
in the old style, with one of the most beautiful sonorities I
ever heard--rich and characterful, but far more mellow than that
of most concert pianists today. He was formed in an era when it
was commonly held that a fine accompanist should not act like
a second soloist or try to "one-up" his partner. Rather,
in Walter's words, s/he "should do everything in their power
to show their soloist to best effect, make them sound great."
That's a somewhat different philosophy than prevails these days,
isn't it? :) But it made him the ideal partner for Gingold, whose
silky sound had countless captivating colors and inflections,
but was somewhat small by today's standards.
Of course even in Walter Robert's youth there were great pianists
who seem not to have subscribed to the view that an accompanist
should be slightly subservient to his/her soloist. Alfred Cortot
is one who immediately comes to mind. Whether playing with Casals,
Thibaud or in trio with both, it doesn;t seem to have entered
Cortot's mind that he should subordinate himself to his string
partners. He went at it "no holds barred"--and a good
thing, too, in my opinion as the results were often magical. (On
the other hand, it seems to me that Cortot did assume a slightly
more "deferential" attitude when collaborating with
Maggie Teyte in the 1936 recording of Debussy songs that was so
crucial to the revival of her career.)
Karen M. Taylor Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
Ossy Renardy (violin)