Isabelle Faust's Beethoven Violin Concerto (Thanks, Paul Seydor)

Hello (again) Paul,

I’ve more than a few times bought unfamiliar records and CDs that have been mentioned in TAS equipment reviews; none has ever been less than interesting, many have been terrific, ones I listen to often.

I think you’ll find the Heifetz/Rodzinski Beethoven revelatory in two respects. First, I think it’s performed with what I think are the correct tempos. You want PRAT? This performance will have you breathing with the music. And I don’t just mean that these are the tempos the score calls for (that’s argued by folks far more knowledgeable than I), but that they’re the tempos I think the music itself clearly wants. They’re the antithesis of the dragging, droning, reverential tempos of so many wunderkinder, from Perlman to Vengerov, with a peck of stops in between. Blame Fritz Kreisler for that, but he was the pretty much the only one to have carried off the Beethoven at his pace and, at the same time, to have avoided torpor. In almost everyone else’s hands, a 24-minute first movement is just too long.

I’ve played the Heifetz/Rodzinski and the Faust/Belohlavek CDs for folks who say classical music makes them drowsy; they loved them.

Second, it reveals Heifetz to be not the emotionally measured, constrained, perfectionist he often was in the studio (the Sibelius, with Hendl, is a marked - actually, a stupendous - exception), but, rather, gives evidence that - in public performance - he could put his virtuosity fully in the service of passioned, nuanced expression. The CD is a restoration of an acetate of a 1946 N.Y. Philharmonic radio broadcast. I think that in every way but sonics (though these sonics are astonishingly rich, thanks to Mr. Harnoy’s efforts) it puts the Munch collaboration in the shade.

I seem to want to listen to “historic” performances of the Beethoven (historic usually meaning mono recordings, often air checks). As well as the Heifetz/Rodzinski, I love Adolf Busch/Fritz Busch, Huberman/Barzin, Neveu/Rosbaud. Curious it is that the only modern performances I’ve found listenable (out of dozens) are by two women: Mela Tenenbaum (also a TAS recommendation, by Robert Greene), and Isabelle Faust.

By the way, I love Francescatti in everything he did with Mitropoulos (Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Bruch, Prokofiev) and with Bernstein (Brahms, Sibelius), but, for the Beethoven, give me Heifetz/Rodzinski, Tenenbaum/Richard Kapp, and, now, Faust/Belohlavek.

I know that you, and others, think highly of Hilary Hahn’s Beethoven. She certainly has fine chops, but, like so many post-war, conservatory-trained fiddlers, she enunciates, as taught, every damn note - and misses the flow (the recordings I cited above are instructive here). It’s essentially, to say the least, a very skillful performance, but it is, I think, a juvenile performance. On the other hand, I can’t imagine the Bernstein Serenade, on the same CD, played better, by soloist or orchestra. There she is expressive in a way she is not in the Beethoven. In it, she’s bold, she’s passionate; she reaches a pinnacle of musicianship. I’d love to hear what she’s doing with the Beethoven today, ten years on; I hope I’ll live to hear what she does with it ten years from now.

P.S. News of Gordon Holt’s death reminds me of Holt’s Law, so rarely violated. The finest performance, qua performance, of the Tchaikovsky I know of on record (a Cembal d’amour CD) is by Heifetz with William Steinberg and the L.A. Philharmonic, broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl in 1949. It’s thrilling, the performance of a lifetime. The sound: execrable, of course. I don’t think even Jacob Harnoy could salvage it. But I listen, and I enjoy.

Best wishes!

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