In Praise of Oscar Shumsky

As I have often remarked in this blog, playing the music of Fritz Kreisler is no easy matter, and very few of those who tackle the pieces come anywhere near Kreisler himself. Two violinists who did come somewhere near Kreisler were Joseph Gingold and Oscar Shumsky, both of whom were friends and admirers of the great man. Gingold, like other masters of the violin such as David Nadien, recorded very little. In the America of much of that period, if you did not have a contract with CBS or RCA you did not make records (unless, like Aaron Rosand, Menuhin, Milstein and others, you had contacts with record companies in Europe). Oscar Shumsky was born in Chicago in 1917 to Russian parents, and his teachers included Leopold Auer and Efrem Zimbalist. We are fortunate that, in his sixties and with his technique unimpaired, Shumsky decided to return to the concert platform and to make recordings. There followed a glorious golden autumn of the complete Mozart violin & piano sonatas, the complete Bach works for unaccompanied violin, the complete Brahms-Joachim Hungarian Dances, the six sonatas for solo violin by Eugène Ysaÿe, all 24 of the caprices of Pierre Rode, and much more, including four CDs of the music and arrangements of Kreisler. No record company of the time was going to invest in an unknown 60 year old violinist, so Shumsky's recordings were mainly from little-known companies and, where appropriate, with very junior conductors and orchestras. I saw Shumsky once, playing the Beethoven violin concerto in London with Simon Rattle conducting, around 1987 when Shumsky would have been 70 years old. I remember an impeccable technique, a wonderful sound, playing that focussed on the music rather than on the performer, and a calm, unruffled platform manner that made Jascha Heifetz seem like an extrovert. Shumsky went on to record the concerto with the Philharmonia in 1988.

Listening to Shumsky playing Kreisler yesterday evening (a 1983 recording) was a rare treat. I had not heard the CDs for many years and I lapped up the exquisite playing, the intimate rapport with the music, the wonderful sound of Shumsky's Stradivari violin, the dedicated intelligence of the playing, the miraculous technical adroitness and variety of dynamics and bowing. Here was a real master violinist at work, and Leopold Auer would have been proud of him. It is a real shame that so little was recorded by Shumsky during most of his lifetime, but a true bonus that – unlike Joseph Gingold or David Nadien – he did get to record much of his favourite repertoire later in his life. Most of his recordings from the 1980s have been reissued by Nimbus, thank goodness. So Shumsky's playing lives on. He died in 2000 at the age of 83.