Johannes Brahms; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Violin Concertos (Jascha Heifetz)

Information

Composer: Johannes Brahms; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

• Brahms - Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77
• Tchaikovsky - Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35

Jascha Heifetz, violin

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Fritz Reiner, conductor

Date: 1955; 1957

Label: RCA

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Review

Both these recordings are staples of course, and incarnations have been many and various over the years. RCA brought out the Brahms, for instance, in its uniform liveried re-release series last year (coupled with the Double Concerto with Piatigorsky and Wallenstein). Both performances have their adherents and detractors; Heifetz recorded the Tchaikovsky four times commercially – with Barbirolli pre-War, twice with Sargent, and this recording with Reiner. As for the Brahms the reference recording was his 1939 Boston/Koussevitzky.

There’s no getting away from the fact that Heifetz takes speeds that are consistently brisk in the Brahms. Even a professed admirer, great player (and finger gymnast of the first mark, so “he could if he’d wanted to”) such as Leonid Kogan in his own contemporaneous recordings took markedly slower speeds in every movement of both concertos. In passages where others apply a degree of metrical freedom Heifetz drives forward; there is a sense of absolute tempo directionality that is absorbing if not always warming. There is no sense of physical or digital strain and no technical impediment to Heifetz’s playing – the finger position changes and colouristic devices offer a panoply of exalted musicianship and his own cadenza offers equal challenges to colleagues – have any of them picked up the cadenza? This is driving and leonine playing all round, though in the slow movement we find plenty of expression from the soloist and once more unremitting colour changes. Some indeed will find too many – that the sense of relaxation is missing, and that the phrasing lacks a certain longer line. The finale is driving and adrenalin-fuelled, not perhaps the kind of finale you find from Busch or from Szigeti, two of the leading exponents of this work on disc, but energising in the extreme.

The Tchaikovsky offers some intensely vibrated tone, some Heifetz slides and some brilliant passagework. He too finds the “intimacy” that Joshua Bell sought in his latest recording of this work, unsuccessfully in my view, but of a wholly different kind. The drive here is dynamic, rhythms are sharply etched, and there is abundant sentiment and coruscating drama. A bit too much however toward the end of the first movement where Heifetz adds some of his own amendments to the solo part (I think it’s pure Heifetz, it could be Auer-Heifetz). The slow movement is effortlessly lyric and contoured and the finale is buoyant, brilliant and blistering but full too of the subtlest inflexions and accelerandi. My own preference however remains the 1935 Barbirolli for its greater degree of warmth. 

I’ve not mentioned Reiner. He responds to Heifetz with sang froid and elevated professionalism, drawing out the lines of the Tchaikovsky slow movement for instance with great feeling and accommodating the fast tempi in the Brahms with nerveless control, even if he would, with another soloist, doubtless have relaxed and modified many of the tempi.

Listening at relatively high volume I heard some tape degradation in the opening of the Tchaikovsky and also a degree of surface noise which makes one wonder as to the state of the tapes. I listened on an ordinary set up, not one rigged for SACD. Self-recommending to Heifetz admirers but surely they have these performances already and won’t need an SACD incarnation?

-- Jonathan Woolf

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Johannes Brahms (7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer and pianist. In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable. Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. An uncompromising perfectionist, Brahms destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished. Brahms is often considered both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters, with a highly romantic nature embedded within.

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Romantic Russian composer. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin. Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression.

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Jascha Heifetz (February 2 1901 – December 10, 1987) was a Russian-American violinist, widely regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time. Born in Vilnius, he was was trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Leopold Auer. In 1917 his family fled the Russian Revolution. He made his American debut in 1917 at Carnegie Hall, New York, and became a U.S. citizen in 1925. By the age of 18, Heifetz was the highest-paid violinist in the world. He had a long and successful concert career, touring widely in Europe, the Orient, the Middle East, and Australia. After 1962 he taught at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

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