Some discs tend to
review themselves and you know that this is one of them. Or rather
two of them. This is the latest repackaging, a slimline double,
of some classic Oistrakh performances from 1956 and 1958. His
trio appears in the famous recording of the Beethoven Triple;
we have his self-directed Philharmonia Mozart K216; the Brahms
Double with Fournier; and finally the Prokofiev No.2. Galliera
and Sargent are the conductors in addition to Oistrakh himself
in the Mozart.
Compilation in this
way offers further opportunities to exploit the legacy – I’m not
using the word necessarily in a pejorative sense – but it means
that there will be few collectors who haven’t already heard or
collected these individual performances. The Triple and Double
were well established as an EMI pairing and doubtless, if you’re
an Oistrakh fancier, you will have the company’s previous incarnation
and will be rather wondering why they bothered to add two such
disparate concertos as the Prokofiev and K216. You’ll have those
as well – though you may also have Oistrakh’s other recordings
of K216. My early immersion in his Prokofiev led me to believe
that No.2 was “his” concerto – much in the same way that discographically
Heifetz had earlier “owned” No.1 and Szigeti No.1. I was quite
wrong; Oistrakh left behind more recordings of the first than
the second concerto. Incidentally when is the BBC going to release
commercially Robert Soetens’s 1936 broadcast performance of the
Second Prokofiev with Sir Henry Wood conducting?
The Triple Concerto sees Oistrakh with Sviatoslav
Knushevitzky and Lev Oborin; their partnership was the most prestigious
in Russian music until the emergence of Kogan-Rostropovich-Gilels
trio. Though the violinist and Knushevitzky recorded the Brahms
Double, EMI’s recording teamed him with the elegant Fournier for
this classic recording. Reviewing a disc of this work by a young
pairing - sensitive, slightly whimsical, accommodating – made
me realise how deeply I missed the masculinity of this recording.
The Mozart is notable - putting the big-boned violin playing to
one side for the moment - for the patrician contributions of the
Philharmonia wind principals. That early Prokofiev imprinting
also regrettably stamped Oistrakh’s second movement tempo on my
subconscious metronome. Any faster and I get itchy – but that’s
the way with first loves.
The recordings necessarily include varying
intensities of high-level hiss. Otherwise the transfers sound
no different from any other from the EMI stable. If you’ve read
this far perhaps it means that you have yet to acquire one or
two of these classic recordings. You’ll never regret doing so.
Jonathan Woolf
David Oistrakh
(violin) 
