“Some wonderful playing, but some
pretty rubbishy music”. So remarked an assistant at Blackwell's
Music Shop in Oxford where I was buying a Strad box of three LPs of
Kreisler recordings, many decades ago. I thought of the young man
again today listening to Volume 8 of Naxos' complete Fritz
Kreisler recordings. 24 tracks, all with wonderful playing, and some of pretty rubbishy music.
You will search in vain for recordings
of Jascha Heifetz playing Kreisler pieces, bar a handful. Heifetz, a
big fan of Kreisler all his life, knew he could never get near
Kreisler on his own turf; listening to Kreisler playing his
Liebesleid and Liebesfreud back in 1926, you realise
that no one in the intervening 93 years has come anywhere near
Kreisler in these pieces, with his subtle rubato and sense of
Viennese bonhomie.
A peculiarity of the American music
scene in the earlier decades of the last century is that violinists
such as Kreisler, Elman and Heifetz were often recorded in
“crossover” music of popular tunes. So on Volume 8 we find
Kreisler lavishing his talents on pieces such as Lemare's “Moonlight
and Roses”, or Elwyn Owen's “Invocation” and Irving Berlin's
“Blue Skies”. Over in Europe, one cannot imagine violinists such
as Oistrakh, Kogan, Adolf Busch, Kulenkampff, Schneiderhan, Prihoda or Thibaud
turning to "popular" pieces.
Volume 8 makes one appreciate the
advances that have been made in audio restoration over the past 90
years. The transfers here (by Ward Marston) are truly
state-of-the-art and few allowances need to be made for the 90 year
old sound. I love basking in the sound of Kreisler playing the violin
and here, at the age of 51 and 52, he was still in very fine form.
That rubato, that staccato, those double-stops like no one else plays
them. Thank you, Naxos, for all eight volumes.
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