Josef Wolfsthal (1899-1931) was one of the rising crop of
inter-war German fiddle players, and one of the leading students
of Carl Flesch. His early death ended a career of rising potential
and one that, discographically speaking at any rate, had already
witnessed two recordings of the Beethoven Concerto, the first
a truncated acoustic but the second, as heard here, a complete
electric made in 1929.
Wolfsthal had a quite tightly concentrated core sound. His tone
is neither big nor especially variegated, but it is very sweet
and is applied intelligently throughout. He largely abjures
noticeably expressive portamenti but characterises with exemplary
commitment, and brings a sense of spruce modernity to the Beethoven.
That’s true of those passages in the first movement where older
practitioners habitually slowed down; Wolfsthal is not inflexible
here, but he does keep the tempi flowing relatively quickly,
and he avoids wholly the trap of sentimentalising. His cadenza
– here and in the companion Mozart Concerto, all the cadenzas
are Joachim’s – is played with real dash and bravado. There’s
a swift lyricism in the slow movement and a playful, controlled
vitality in the finale, where, once again, he excels in the
cadenza. It helps, that he plays with the Berlin Philharmonic,
directed here by Manfred Gurlitt, a conductor and composer of
perception.
Earlier in his career Wolfsthal had been concertmaster of the
Berlin State Opera Orchestra, and for the Mozart he joins his
old orchestra, and the conductor Frieder Weissmann. One admires
Wolfsthal here for his bright, pellucid sound. His phrasing
is alert and alive, with an electric vivacity; and his trill
is ringing and tight. He varies and deepens his vibrato width
for the slow movement to considerable effect, as he does in
the finale’s cadenza (with a brisk slide or two), but whilst
there’s no great sense of a presiding personality at work, the
playing is highly musical and impressive – and stylistically
apt, for the time. I don’t have this 78 set, so can’t be sure,
but the strong rallentando at 3:44 in the second movement sounds
very much like a preparation for a side turn, which was a recurring
feature of recordings on 78 and one not often enough singled
out for comment.
You may well have come across Wolfsthal’s name in relation to
Strauss; his solo in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme recording
is still famous, as is his playing in Strauss’s first Ein
Heldenleben traversal. Some of his recordings have been
reissued, as here, but things such as Tartini’s Devil’s Trill,
with Liachowsky, remain resolutely untransferred, so far as
I’m aware. The acoustic Beethoven was released by Biddulph.
This Pristine transfer of the electric version reminds collectors
of Pearl’s release on GEMM CD9387 which, in addition to the
two concertos, included a Beethoven Romance in a 1925
recording conducted by Thierfelder, the same conductor who directed
the acoustic concerto. Mark Obert-Thorn’s transfers successfully
eclipse the older Pearl, by virtue of their cleaner surfaces
and greater detail.
Jonathan Woolf
Josef Wolfsthal (violin) 
