Feigin. Or Feyghin.
RCD prefers the latter transliteration
for the violinist’s name in English
but if Feigin is the preferred German
spelling that’s how I and I suspect
many a Miaskovskian will want it to
remain. Because it was this splendid
player who brought the latter’s concerto
into the consciousness of so many and
who was the first after David Oistrakh
to record the work. It’s surprising
going over his discography to appreciate
just how anomalous an undertaking that
actually was. His principal records
were of trio repertoire with - I’m assuming
– his cellist brother and the pianist
Zhukov. They recorded all the Beethoven
trios and Brahms’s Op.8. But Feigin
did venture a little into sonata waters
and of Russian repertoire he taped Denisov’s
Sonata and Khandoshkin’s Third solo
sonata. Perhaps his biggest sonata undertaking
though was to set down the three Medtner
sonatas and Canzonas 1 and 2. But overall
it’s rather a spartan discography for
so fine a player and very far less inclusive
than that of Eduard Grach.
Feigin was born in
1937 and so is a little younger than
Grach. He studied with Adolf Leschinsky,
a pupil of Flesch, and then attended
Oistrakh’s postgraduate class at the
Moscow Conservatoire, another link with
Grach. He won the 1964 Prague Spring
Competition. The recital enshrined in
this disc represents about a decade’s
worth of performances. All but one is
accompanied by the fine player Victor
Poltoratsky.
The Taneyev sonata
is a Russian favourite and one that
native players are keen to play. Feigin
emphasises the kinship with late Brahms.
His performance is attractively autumnal
and not at all off hand or thrusting.
The slow movement is illustrative not
only of the composer’s instinct for
melodic beauty but for Feigin’s rapt
sustaining of a singing line. The Minuet
is pleasing and the finale smilingly
vivacious and songful and a movement
that has the courage to end gently.
Feigin’s approach is very much to be
contrasted with that of a more assertive
and tensile Russian player – Igor Politkovsky,
whose Taneyev recording made in 1982
can also be found in this series on
RCD 16279.
Both Politkovsky and
Feigin recorded Rubinstein as well –
though Feigin the Op.19 sonata and Politkovsky
the earlier Op.13. Feigin’s playing
here is straightforward, gauche-free,
masculine, bold and powerful. He has
the grandeur and nobility to meet the
lyric episodes in the slow movement
head on and he doesn’t stint the Beethovenian
rhetoric at the start of the finale
either. This is highly effective playing
all round.
Given his interest
in Medtner one would expect the D minor
Nocturne to be good and it’s certainly
well projected and perceptively done
with a fine cantabile. The recital ends
with a tricksy piece from that scion
of the Russian pedagogic school, Leopold
Auer. The Concert Tarantella is a Paganini-meets-Iberia
tester, which Feigin dispatches with
aplomb.
This is a pleasurable
if perhaps modest salute to a distinguished
player. Let’s hope the rest of his discography
can be profitably mined for the nuggets
that are there and will reflect even
more fully the range of his enthusiasms
and talents.
Jonathan Woolf
Grigory
Feigin (violin) 
