Ning Feng and Zhang Zuo play Brahms

I have often had doubts about violinists of the Russian school playing Brahms. Too often, Johannes Brahms is made to sound a bit like Tchaikovsky, or Dvorak. So I was curious when a friend sent me a new CD of the three Brahms sonatas for violin and piano played by two Chinese musicians: Ning Feng, and Zhang Zuo. If I have doubts about Russian Brahms, how about Chinese Brahms? Well, listening to the CD, I am won over and full of admiration. I know Ning Feng especially as a virtuoso violinist playing Paganini and Ernst. In Brahms, he plays with sensitivity and a true sense of the music, not laying the paint on too thickly as often happens with Brahms players. He has a wonderful sense of light and shade, of varied dynamics all allied, of course, to a perfect technique. Tempi flow well, and the music does not bog down as can happen with Brahms' thick textures. Feng's Stradivarius violin sounds wonderful, and his passages in double stops are particularly memorable; almost Fritz Kreisler standard.

I was worried that Zhang Zuo, the pianist, might turn out to be a Chinese equivalent of Emanuel Bay, Heifetz's all too subservient accompanist in duo sonatas. Zuo is not as impressive as Ning Feng, but she does not rock the boat and joins in a convincing partnership. She does not have the personality or authority of Julius Katchen (with Josef Suk) or Edwin Fischer (with Gioconda de Vito), or Yuja Wang (with Kavakos): but who does? Zuo does, however, show her fangs in the scherzo from the F.A.E sonata to which Brahms contributed; here the piano has a more dominant role. Listening to these three Brahms violin and piano sonatas, the musical interest is 70% violin and 30% piano. Which may be about right, though it would not work in the violin and piano sonatas of Mozart, or César Franck, amongst others.

It is difficult to talk of a "golden age" of violin playing, since only a minute percentage of top violinists were ever recorded in previous ages. All I know is that, at the present time, we are spoilt for choice with top violinists from every quarter of the globe. For me, Ning Feng is one of many top violinists of the present age. I recently greatly admired his playing of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas and partitas. After nearly 70 years of listening to, and playing, the three Brahms sonatas, they are almost too familiar. It's a long time since I enjoyed them as much as this time round, thanks to Ning Feng, Zhang Zuo -- and Channel, the CD publisher.

Leonid Borisovich Kogan. 1924-82

If three major musicians are going to play together in chamber music, they need to have played together often for pleasure, and not just meet up in a recording studio, or at an international festival. The twentieth century saw two major trios: Cortot, Thibaud and Casals, and Gilels, Kogan and Rostropovich. All friends, until politics tore them apart.

I have just been listening to Tchaikovsky's Trio for piano, violin and cello Opus 50. One of my evergreen favourite works. Inevitably, the recording I listened to (superbly re-furbished by the French company Diapason) was that recorded in Moscow in 1952 by Kogan, Gilels and Rostropovich; an all-time classic, and as Russian as caviar, icy winds, and vodka. One of the few works I can only ever listen to with the same recording: no competitors after 71 years.

Leonid Kogan was, for me, the primary Russian violinist of the twentieth century. Unlike Kreisler or Heifetz, he also excelled in chamber music (the French company Doremi issued a 5-CD box of Kogan, Gilels and Rostropovich in various piano trios by Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Schumann, Borodin, Saint-Saëns, et al). His many recordings are classics, with the violin concertos of Paganini, Khachaturian, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms still supreme. Being now well outside the international copyright convention of 50 years, his recordings are reissued and reissued by a multitude of companies with wildly differing success results. Transfers range from unacceptable to not too bad at all. In the West, Oistrakh was preferred because many sniffed at Kogan's politics (Shostakovich always called him "Comrade Kogan"). However decades after his death, all that is left are recordings of his violin playing. One of my all-time favourite violinists and musicians.