Full track-listing below
DECCA 5346246 [5 CDs: 342:47]
From Decca France, distributed by Discovery Records, comes a 5-CD box
charting a corner of the repertoire of the combustible art of Ivry Gitlis.
Now in his 90s this ever-questing magician of the fiddle is worthy of
sustained salutes after a lifetime of freewheeling iconoclasm, independence
of mind and spirit, and sheer refusal to buckle down to the expected dictates
of a concert-giving straightjacketing. No wonder Nigel Kennedy loves him.
Most of the material comes from his back catalogue, but there are live
performances here, all of which will be duly noted in this review. The
first disc is given over to Paganini. The Concertos are with Stanislaw
Wisłocki from 1966 with the piano-accompanied items with the veteran
accompanist – the man who often accompanied Thibaud – Tasso
Janopoulo dating from the following year. You would expect nothing else
of Gitlis but committed, resinous playing – never aloof, never aristocratic,
always charged and brilliantly incisive, often at the expense of tonal
purity. The First Concerto embodies these qualities perfectly, with heart-stopping
accelerandi, quivering tensile legato, intense vibrato, and a total unwillingness
to take passagework for granted: has any violinist in recorded history
brought passagework to simmering life as relentlessly as Gitlis? He plays
the Sauret cadenza. His slow movement is constantly warmed, cajoled, tautened,
breached, broached and occasionally buckled. Not for an instant will he
settle for a pure-toned unvaried legato. In the first movement of the
Second Concerto, for which he furnishes his own cadenza, there is a similar
level of intervention and variation of colour, articulation and bow weight.
The expressive finger position changes in the slow movement occasionally
remind one of Heifetz but he reels off the left hand pizzicato in the
Campanella finale with bewitching panache. In the smaller pieces
he reveals pathos in the Cantabile and superb attack in I
Palpiti.
Gitlis recorded the complete Paganini Caprices in Paris in 1976 but was
unsatisfied with the results. He finally relented three decades later
declaring that ‘they’re not as bad as all that’. Well,
no indeed. He has something of late-middle period Ricci’s acerbity
and incisive brilliance here, though Gitlis’s tone is more abrasive
still. Some minor intonation and articulation problems come and go but
they are minor – I wonder whether this is what Gitlis found unpalatable
about the set. I noticed the slight change in acoustic between the two
recording dates a couple or so months apart, but it’s not of any
great concern. Surely what emerges from this blistering performance is
Gitlis’s nonpareil powers of communicative intensity, as well as
his ability to shape phrases into musical sense, never to use the music
as a mere vehicle for the practice of violinistics – even when Paganini
presents him with something of an opportunity to do so. The razory brilliance
of the playing will probably alienate those who admire a silken and even
tone production, but that is not and never was Gitlis’s interest.
For the central disc we turn to Wieniawski in 1969 and Saint-Saëns
in 1968. He plays both the Wieniawskis with Jean-Claude Casadesus conducting
the Monte Carlo National Opera Orchestra. The results are typically dashing,
vital, also pugnacious and daring. He is alive to the Bruch-like lyricism
of the slow movement of the Op.14 but in the better known Second Concerto
manages to colour and coil the music with remarkable energy, his expressive
arsenal however remaining taut. Typically he plays one of the less-well
know Saint-Saëns concertos, the Second, bringing a fulsome swing
to it and a bardic romance to the violin and harp exchanges in the slow
movement in answer to the stern orchestral statements. Parts of the playing
achieve a truly searing level of intensity. The unfinished Fourth Concerto
– eleven minutes - is ardently declaimed (it’s also known
as the Morceau de concert) and note as well that the Caprice,
Op.52 No.6 in Ysaÿe’s orchestration, can be heard at the end
of the fifth and final disc.
The fourth disc presents live material. The Brahms Double, with Maurice
Gendron, is with the Orchestra national de France conducted by Michel
Tabachnik in February 1971. The ethos here is again febrile – how
is it not with Gitlis – though seldom to the detriment of the music.
Passionate and dramatically alive, the two string players don’t
always make for the most obviously sympathetic of pairings, at least tonally
speaking, but they manage to offer a more unusual, almost – at times
- oppositional approach. Gitlis’s studio recording in Vienna of
the Berg concerto with William Strickland is rightly an acclaimed part
of his relatively small commercial legacy. It’s now in a Brilliant
Classics boxed set devoted to the violinist. This French performance is
no less impressive in its way, with the violinist’s tone taking
on an increasing range of colours as the work generates its own comparable
apotheosis. For Gitlis admirers the subtle differences make acquisition
mandatory.
The last disc offers an emotive relief from this level of intensity with
a series of smaller pieces recorded in Tokyo, recorded live. Most are
from recitals with Shiego Neriki in May 1985, but the Brahms Hungarian
Dance and Falla Danse espagnole were taped in 1989. The Bartók
Romanian Dances come from recitals in December 1994 and January 1995.
Gitlis’s art is heard in microcosm here, sometimes to an overpowering
degree so unrelieved in the sound and so constant the changes of colour
and bowing in this sequence. Thus whilst it’s marvellous to hear
such personalised drama, the Debussy tends to wilt, the Kreisler pieces
take on a rather different, rhythmic and tonal character form one usually
encountered, and his nervously quivering portamenti tend to overbalance
the works’ charm. Still, you won’t want to miss his Wieniawski
Capriccio-Valse, his passionately abandoned Mendelssohn Wings
of Song, or even the now rougher-toned by intensely communicative
Bartók Romanian Dances.
Gitlis is a law unto himself, a frequent absence in the studios, but a
magnificent example of ‘to thine own sense be true’. The musical
world would be the poorer without his single-minded and capricious presence.
Jonathan Woolf
Full track-listing
CD 1/2 [75:03/ 68:41]
Niccolò PAGANINI (1782-1840)
Violin Concerto No.1, Op.6 [29:10]
Violin Concerto No.2, Op.7 [27:20]
I Palpiti, Op.13 [8:18]
Cantabile, Op.17 [3:38]
Sonatine No.12, Op.3 No.6 [3:15]
Minuet [2:56]
Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra/Stanislaw Wisłocki
Tasso Janopoulo (piano)
rec. 1966 (concertos) and 1967
24 Caprices for solo violin, Op.1 [68:41]
rec. 1976
CD 3 [77:12]
Henryk WIENIAWSKI (1835-1880)
Violin Concerto No.1, Op.14 [20:53]
Violin Concerto No.2, Op.22 [17:11]
Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921)
Violin Concerto No.2, Op.58 [27:55]
Violin Concerto No.4 unfinished, Op.62 [11:11]
Monte Carlo National Opera Orchestra/Jean-Claude Casadesus
Monte Carlo National Opera Orchestra/Eduard van Remoortel (Saint-Saëns)
rec.1968 (Saint-Saens) and 1969 (Wieniawski)
CD 4 [52:59]
Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Double Concerto for violin, cello and orchestra, Op.102 [29:47]
Alban BERG (1885-1937)
Violin Concerto, ‘to the memory of an angel’ [23:12]
Maurice Gendron (cello)/Orchestre National de l’ORFT/Michel Tabachnik
(Brahms) and Fritz Rieger (Berg)
rec. July 1967 (Berg) and February 1971 (Brahms)
CD 5 [68:52]
Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
La fille aux cheveux de lin arr. Arthur Hartmann [2:25]
Fritz KREISLER (1875-1962)
Caprice Viennois [3:57]
Liebesleid [4:16]
Schön Rosmarin [2:00]
Antonin DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)
Humoresque arr. Fritz Kreisler [3:48]
Henryk WIENIAWSKI (1835-1880)
Capriccio-Valse, Op.7 [6:57]
Grigoras DINICU (1889-1949)
Hora staccato arr. Jascha Heifetz [2:12]
Jules MASSENET (1842-1912)
Méditation from Thaïs [4:31]
Felix MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
On Wings of Song, Op.34 No.2 [3:34] TRADITIONAL
Londonderry Air arr. Fritz Kreisler [4:11]
Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937)
Pièce en forme de habanera [2:48]
Pablo de SARASATE (1844-1908)
Zigeunerweisen, Op.20 [8:28]
Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Hungarian Dance No.1 [3:13]
Manuel de FALLA (1876-1946)
Danse espagnole – La vide breve [3:23]
Béla BARTÓK (1881-1945)
Six Popular Romanian Dances [6:14]
Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921)
Caprice, d’après l’etude en forme de valse, Op.52 No.6
orch. Eugène Ysaÿe [7:05]
Shiego Neriki (piano) and Shuku Iwasaki (piano: Brahms, Falla, Bartók)
rec. 1985 Tokyo, live; Jun 1989 (Brahms, Falla); 1994-95 (Bartók)
Monte Carlo National Opera Orchestra/Eduard van Remoortel (Saint-Saens,
rec. 1968)
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