The white-heat
Gold Standard for German violinists
in Sibelius was set by Kulenkampff,
whose live broadcast with Furtwängler
has been widely re-issued. That
was a performance of searing intensity.
Over a decade later Gerhard Taschner
turned to it – he shared something
of the Hanseatic Kulenkampff’s predilection
for the Slavic. But Taschner’s Sibelius
couldn’t be more different from
that of his august predecessor.
It’s lightly bowed and curiously
undemonstrative despite the quick
slides. He reserves tensile power
and instead adopts a broadly aristocratic,
rather aloof profile. The first
movement cadential passages are
rather unconvincingly phrased and
the orchestra meanwhile sounds rather
prosaic and uncommitted. Taschner
brings some fanciful moments to
the finale, a movement he apparently
spoke to Sibelius about in 1944,
proposing a slower-than-usual tempo.
Here he plays the standard type
of tempo. And as a whole this is
a rather lightweight reading.
Tahra has already
released two Taschner performances
of the Khachaturian concerto, one
with the Radio Symphony Orchestra
of Berlin under Rother from September
1947 [Tahra 350/51] and this one
from 1955 with Schmidt-Isserstedt.
Once more it shows Taschner’s affinities
with music somewhat to the east
of the Austro-German hegemony, a
trait - as one has already noted
- that he shared with Kulenkampff,
who was Hanseatic, and inclined
to be broad-minded. Taschner’s way
with the work is tensile and enjoyable
though it’s not the last word in
tonal variety. He’s certainly not
nearly as tonally arresting or rhythmically
incisive as the two leading Russian
exponents of the work, Oistrakh
and Kogan. He finds poetic warmth
in the second movement within certain
rather limited expressive ranges
but leads a spirited, fluent finale.
The Sarasate was
taped in a very reverberant church
acoustic with the Bamberg Symphony
Orchestra under Fritz Lehmann. Taschner
is at his best here, charismatic,
powerful - totally committed music
making.
I prefer MDG’s
transfer of the Khachaturian to
Tahra’s. It has a slightly clearer
sound-stage than Tahra’s slightly
muddier one. As for the Sibelius
if you have Archipel ARPCD 8232
– the most recent incarnation of
which I’m aware – you‘ll find MDG’s
work clearer and far more open on
all fronts and greatly to be preferred.
Jonathan Woolf
Gerhard Taschner (violin) 
