Rostal recorded strongly for Decca in the 1940s and early 1950s,
first on 78 with his sonata partner Franz Osborn, and then on
LP. Prominent amongst his recordings then was a sequence of Beethoven
sonata recordings and his book on the sonatas is well admired
(Toccata Press, 1985). Many of the pre-War discs have been re-released
and the LP recordings of sonatas by Schubert, Elgar and Delius
are also still available. A Symposium CD1068, which contained
a live performance of the Second Bartók Concerto as well as concertos
by Berg, Bernard Stevens and Shostakovich (No.1), has now, one
hopes temporarily, been deleted by the company.
The
recordings under discussion date from a reasonably prolific
period for him – 1949 to 1951. The programme doesn’t make
a great deal of sense considered in isolation but in terms
of disc reclamation it fits nicely enough as an example of
Rostal’s sonata and concerto strengths. His playing was never
the acme of a beautiful tone. Though Boris Schwarz, who studied
with him under Flesch in Berlin, was a great admirer and praised
his playing in Great Masters of the Violin, he
tends now to polarise listeners into a sort of mini-Huberman
dilemma; intellect and tonal roughness versus rich tone, though
Rostal’s playing as such was not technically anachronistic,
as Huberman’s was.
The
Kreutzer marries these qualities of tonal abrasion
with elevated ensemble perception. Rostal’s view is essentially
unhurried, deliberate, and conveyed via a brittle tonal armoury
that stresses the combative elements in the music. Those moments
of contrasting lyricism can sound – do sound, to me – somewhat
queasily sentimentalised but there is, in defence of the performance,
an explosive element that seldom short changes one. The pulse
of the variational second movement is again measured but tempo
relationships here are fluid. In the finale brittle attaca
returns. This unvarnished, rosin-less tensile approach offers
a challenge and so too do small moments of unsteadiness in
the finale. That aside the drama is maintained. There’s a
bonus of the Scherzo from the F.A.E. sonata in a rougher transfer.
One
might think that Bartók’s Second Concerto would be a good
fit for Rostal. It was a work he clearly admired. He was paired
with the LSO and Sargent, who does a rather better job than
Furtwängler did for Menuhin when they recorded it very slightly
later. The balance between solo violin and orchestra is immeasurably
better here as well – in the Menuhin-Furtwängler it was fatally
compromised. Still, there will be those who cavil at the broader
tempi enjoyed by the Rostal-Sargent pairing which can sound
laboured when set against fleeter and more fluent performances.
Sargent was a premier league accompanist though and worked
with Rostal on the Berg and acquits himself well enough. What
Rostal doesn’t possess is the variegated sense of colour that
many have espoused in this work (I’m a great admirer of the
Menuhin-Dorati set of 1947).
Previous
issues in this new Retrospective line, from Brilliant’s stable,
have made outsize claims for ‘first ever CD’ status, when
a sober look would have led to no such conclusion. Here I
have no cause to show that these three monos have been released
on CD before, though Rostal is such a collectible artist and
it’s not impossible that Japanese editions exist. Otherwise
I’m happy to acknowledge their arrival on the stage in this
way. The transfers are reasonable rather than exceptional,
taken from commercial pressings almost certainly.
Jonathan Woolf
