Nicolò PAGANINI (1782-1840)
Violin Concerto No.1 in D major, Op.6, MS21 (1815) (arr. August Wilhelmj) [20:53]
Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921)
Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso Op. 28 (1863) [9:25]
Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op.77 (1878) [40.46]
Guila Bustabo (violin)
Munich Radio Orchestra/Robert Heger (Paganini, Saint-Saens) rec. live, January 1959, Haus des Sports, Munich; Orchestra della Radio Svizzera Italiana/Otmar Nussio (Brahms), rec. live February 1963, Kursaal Teatro Apollo, Lugano
MELOCLASSIC MC 2005 [71:46]
The American violinist Guila Bustabo (1916-2002) was much in demand to
play Wilhelmj’s arrangement of the first movement of Paganini’s
D major Violin Concerto. She recorded it in Berlin in 1940, Fritz Zaun
conducting the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, at around the same time she
recorded the Sibelius Concerto. Nearly two decades later here Bustabo
was in Munich, performing it again - for Bavarian Radio this time with
the veteran Robert Heger directing the Munich Radio Orchestra. Much had
happened to Bustabo in the meantime, and this isn’t the place for
a biography of her extraordinary life, except to note that she was for
some years not especially welcome in her native country.
The recording level is a touch low so volume adjustment helps, and the
orchestra is a touch recessed, about which little can be done. Bustabo,
fortunately, takes centre-stage. Her playing is still in many ways admirable
and it’s lost much of the often startling metrical disturbances
that afflicted her back in the 1930s when she could be very wayward indeed.
There is plenty of expressive phrasing, though her tone is not especially
big, and plenty of technical accomplishment to be heard as well. Her harmonics
are excellent and so too is the way she dispatches the cadenza. She brings
out a more tremulous vibrato for Saint-Saëns’ Introduction
and Rondo Capriccioso, a work she didn’t otherwise record in
the studio. The rapidity and refinement of her bowing can also clearly
be heard.
The greatest interpretative challenges are reserved for the 1963 Lugano
performance of the Brahms Concerto in which she’s partnered by Otmar
Nussio. The tempo in the opening movement is conventional-to-relaxed,
but it only really becomes apparent when orchestral counter-themes reach
exhaustion levels trying to wait for her to move forward. This can sound
slightly disjointed in the first movement, and a close recording allows
us to hear plenty of bow changes. She plays the cadenza by Kreisler. The
slow movement is somewhat of a piece with the opening, relaxed and not
unattractive, whilst the finale isn’t quite as buoyant as could
be. There’s not much sight or sound of gypsy abandon.
Yet this is an interesting disc, presented in accustomed digipak style
with notes tipped in. Live performances have survived of Bustabo with
Mengelberg in the Beethoven and Bruch G minor concertos, and there’s
the much more recent Wolf-Ferrari with Kempe in 1972. Otherwise there
is no Brahms, which was the principal discographic casualty, and now we
have one. If it’s not a performance that bristles and bridles, that
digs into the strings and drives blazingly, that’s probably because
Bustabo had mellowed over time. Violin aficionados will welcome the opportunity
this disc affords of tracing Bustabo in these rare performances, on the
cusp of her long professorship in Innsbruck.
Jonathan Woolf
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