CD-774: Joseph Szigeti Plays Bach Unaccompanied Violin Works
MP3
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Rec. New York, 10th November 1946, 13th February 1949
Original CD transfer from acetate discs by Music and Arts, 1993
XR remastering by Andrew Rose, April 2007
Download ID: 295105
(Duration 59'48")
Sonata No 1 in G, BWV 1001
Partita No. 3 in E, BWV 1006
Sonata No. 2 in A, BWV 1003
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sample movement:
"Szigeti’s violin has rarely sounded so warm on records, and this
transfer brings out a beauty in the playing that wasn’t apparent
on the original Music & Arts disc..."
Henry Fogel, Fanfare
VOCAL VIOLIN Remembering Joseph Szigeti and an expressive approach we have lost
by William H. Youngren
One evening in the mid-1960s a friend and I got together to listen to Joseph Szigeti's 1933 recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Neither of us had heard it for years, and just then it was not available on LP. I had taped another friend's copy of the original 78-rpm album.
The experience was overwhelming.Szigeti was by turns elegant, impassioned,
noble, touchingly vulnerable,
heroically self-assertive, exuberantly
virtuosic -whatever the music demanded,
precisely when it so demanded.
He spoke so directly to us,
everything fell so naturally into place,
the whole performance seemed so consistently
and inevitably right, that for
the moment any other performance
was inconceivable.
In order to gain some perspective, my
friend put on Isaac Stern's 1959 recording, the performance of choice during the 1960s. It was indeed very
impressive, and afterward I said so. "Yes," my friend replied, "but after
Szigeti, Stern sounds a bit too much like General Motors."
I can think of no better way of suggesting
the difference between the
most highly acclaimed concert violin
playing of recent years - the playing
of Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas
Zukerman, and a host of others, right
down to the ubiquitous Nadja Salerno-
Sonnenberg - and the playing of
Szigeti, the centenary of whose birth
we celebrate this year. Fine as these
modern players are, their performances
have a certain oppressive monotony.
Almost every phrase, regard
less of content or context, is delivered
in the same big, luscious, vibrato-ridden
tone. Too often the point seems to
be the relentless beauty and intensity
of the violin sound rather than the
expressive content of the music. There
is indeed something impersonal - corporate
- about such playing, despite
its unfailing technical excellence...
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