Unlike the 12 fairly full CDs in the Audite set of Furtwängler recordings made by the RIAS between 1947 and 1954—released in 2009 and included in my Want List for that year—this box of recordings by Hans Knappertsbusch with the Berlin Philharmonic is comparatively thin. There are two live recordings made at the Titania Palace—two days apart in 1950 with very different programs—and three studio sessions. And one of those studio sessions documented the same program as the January 30, 1950, live performance, just two days before the concert. (The run-through and recording before the live event no doubt appealed to the rehearsal-resistant Knappertsbusch, and fit with the economics of the time. It does give an opportunity to hear how much two contemporaneous performances of the same works could vary under the legendarily spontaneous conductor’s leadership.) The other sessions came in January of 1951—the Bruckner Eighth—and January of 1952 for the Beethoven and an operetta excerpt. That, regrettably, was all that made it onto the high-quality 30-inch-per-second tape masters held in the German Radio archive. Changing tastes, other projects, and the ascendancy of Karajan soon after brought this collaboration to an end.

These original masters, of course, are the reason for this release. All of these performances have been available before, some in expert transfers by the likes of Tahra and Music & Arts, but none had access to the original tapes, and the additional clarity and dynamic range, and the lower distortion of these Audite transfers, are immediately attractive. While one could take exception to some of the equalization decisions—resulting notably in some wiriness of the high strings in the Bruckner and Schubert recordings—there is no gainsaying the extra detail that is revealed, the greater power of the climaxes, and the sense of ambient space now heard in these recordings.

Collectors of this artist’s work will know what to expect of the performances. The program notes make a theme of the expectation of slowness, and it is my own experience that Knappertsbusch has routinely been lumped with Furtwängler, Klemperer, and Celibidache as if these four represented some distinctly dilatory school of conducting. In truth, each of these conductors has given the casual listener reason for the slow tag—note Knappertsbusch’s somnambulant Munich Bruckner Eighth on Westminster—but as the more experienced collector will know, tempo is relative, and the impetuous drama of Knappertsbusch is nothing like the deep mysticism of Furtwängler, or the monumentalism of later Klemperer or Celibidache. Still, I am not sure that these recordings belie the stereotype for slowness in general. Knappertsbusch is often deliberate, especially to ears attuned to the quicker tread of present-day performances of these works. Listeners will find the Beethoven Eighth ponderous or profound according to their persuasion. The Haydn “Surprise” Symphony has a weightiness that rather mitigates its high spirits, regardless the enthusiasm of the playing.

The overall timings of the Schubert “Unfinished” seem unexceptional until one realizes that Knappertsbusch did not observe exposition repeats. The studio recording is the more conventional, if any performance by Knappertsbusch can be called that, a very pleasant but not highly distinctive performance. It is in the live performance of two days later that the musicians discover the full potential of Knappertsbusch’s approach, controversial as that may be. It is full of portent, dark and forbidding in the very moderate Allegro moderato: slow, especially at the start, but strikingly powerful. The Andante con moto is also rather unhurried, but with phrasing flexible and alive to the impulse of the moment.

His Bruckner, however, is anything but measured. Under the conductor’s impulsive and fluid direction, these performances breathe like a living thing. The performance times are mainstream—the annotator makes a point of their being generally faster than the “normative” Wand—but as with the Schubert, the overall tempos tell little. Within that basic timing, the conductor shapes the works compellingly, with extremes of tempo and many shadings of dynamics and texture. The effect is often exhilarating and, as at the end of the Adagio of the Ninth, quite moving. The studio version is shaped with comparative restraint, the tempos in general somewhat faster and less extreme. Two days later he takes his audience and the apparently telepathic—though not infallible—orchestra through an emotional roller-coaster of a performance that leaves the listener drained at the end. Risk-taking in live performances was this conductor’s modus operandi, and sometimes it failed to come together into a coherent vision. In this live performance of the Ninth, and in the similarly dramatic Eighth of 11 months later, the spontaneity pays off handsomely.

Lighter music is the other part of the offering here. Those who only know Knappertsbusch through his Bruckner and Wagner may be surprised to find that he shows an equal affinity for the waltz and polka. The concert on February 1, 1950, was what we would now call a pops concert. The one work of symphonic scope is the leisurely Haydn symphony. The rest consists of operetta overtures, a Viennese waltz, and ballet music by Tchaikovsky. As with the larger-scale works, there are liberties taken. At one point Knappertsbusch slows the Pizzacato Polka to a droll attention-getting crawl, and he starts the Komzák Bad’ner Madl’n waltz at a crawl and then pulls it about in a most willful way. Yet the audience loves it, judging from the included applause. At the very worst, listeners will feel that these and the other Viennese confections are loved to death, but I think most will find them charming. The same is true of the Tchaikovsky suite, which is slower than is the norm, but which remains very light on its feet.

Another service that this release provides for the collector, besides making these recordings available in superior transfers, is to clarify their provenance. Previous issuers have had to guess a bit at dates—another concert of the Bruckner and Schubert on January 29, 1950, as it turns out, was not recorded—and there has been some confusion between the live and studio recordings. This is not a major issue for most listeners, who will be interested primarily in the sound and artistry. This set, in the former quality, supersedes all other releases of these performances. Anyone remotely interested in Knappertsbusch’s art or in the symphonies of Bruckner should add it to his or her collection post haste.

Fricsay (1914–1963) struck me as the Dinu Lipatti of conductors: once you heard his performance of a work, there seemed no other possible way to play it. A student of Bartók at the Budapest Academy, he became an unmatched interpreter of his teacher’s music; his championship of Bartók in the late 1940s and 1950s was a major force in bringing the composer international recognition as one of the masters. Most of Fricsay’s Bartók recordings came just before the stereo era, yet they never pale beside newer ones. His Concerto for Orchestra remains the ideal version even today, matched only by Reiner’s account from Chicago, and that only because of its spectacular stereo sound. Fricsay’s other specialty was Mozart: his Entführung and Zauberflöte, both with Stader and Streich, are treasures. No one in Germany played much Haydn in the first half of the 20th century, yet Fricsay shows an understanding and taste rare for the day. Robbins Landon and Scherchen were bringing Haydn to Vienna, but only for recordings; local audiences paid little attention.

Despite some drawbacks—a mediocre orchestra and merely adequate monaural sound—these are fine Haydn performances. Fricsay was a superb orchestra builder, raising a new radio orchestra called RIAS (Radio in the American Sector, of divided Berlin) to the near equal of that city’s great Philharmonic. Other postwar radio startups, such as this WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne, were less fortunate; as a guest conductor, Fricsay had to make do with what he found. His “Trauer” is dark and serious, as befits Haydn’s minor keys. The opening Allegro con brio is less hectic than Scherchen’s inspired performance, but no less impassioned. The Menuet is pure Fricsay, formal yet graceful, characteristics of most of his performances. The Adagio avoids excess sentiment and shortchanges repeats but seems just right anyway—the old Fricsay magic; and a rapid Presto finale works despite taxing the WDR strings. There are a few old-fashioned touches (this was 1953), notably the pulling back of tempo for final chords in most codas, but this remains one of the finest accounts of the “Trauer,” Fricsay’s dignity a complement to Scherchen’s passion.

The B♭ Symphony has considerable sparkle and plenty of power but is short on humor; this was more a product of the time (1952) than of the conductor, whose Mozart and Bartók could smile beatifically. Also symptomatic of the era is a lack of repeats; Fricsay does not take those in either sonata-form movement. He varies the playing in the Menuet repeats, giving soloists more leeway the second and third times. He does give full value to Haydn’s tenuto marks and rests at a time when conductors seemed embarrassed by delay and silence. Oddly, the tacet measure near the end of the finale (four bars before the moderato) is ignored; perhaps this is an editing error. The coda has the violin solo but no cembalo. Only the edition of the score and the orchestra’s limitations—sloppy string articulation, a tinny (when audible) oboe, and ugly trumpets—keep this from being a competitive recording of the B♭ Symphony.

Warts and all, I’m delighted to have this sample of Fricsay’s Haydn.

Born in 1911 in the Ukraine, Igor Markevitch was truly a citizen of the world, having held conducting positions in France, Spain, Monte Carlo, Italy, Canada, Sweden, and Cuba while appearing as a guest in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Poland, and elsewhere during his career. He was raised in France and Switzerland. A musical prodigy, he attracted the attention of Serge Diaghilev, who promoted his career as a composer until the ballet impresario’s death in 1929. Although he apprenticed with Hermann Scherchen, his primary focus during the 1930s was on composing. For whatever reason, after World War II, he concentrated on conducting, seldom promoting his own music. Deteriorating hearing forced him to curtail his career during the 1970s. He died in 1983.

He’s not so easy to pigeonhole. The conductors that I think he most resembled, say, Eugène Goossens, Robert Irving, Efrem Kurtz, and Constant Lambert, have faded into the past along with him; how about Antal Dorati, with a lighter touch? I suppose it is no coincidence that all of those conductors, at least initially, made their mark as ballet maestros. There was a vigorous rhythmic component to Markevitch’s style, and ballet music made up a large fraction of his repertoire. To be sure, there are Markevitch recordings that don’t fit my characterization (an eccentric Tchaikovsky Fourth on French EMI, for example), but I think I’ll stand by my reluctant attempt to classify him. Reviews from his prime years suggest that some listeners found him too lean, too clipped in phrasing, too abrupt, maybe too “streamlined”—gemütlichkeit and angst were not his thing. He was generally a “fast” conductor.

Markevitch made studio recordings of all the selections on this disc. I never heard his Schubert Third Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic but I did hear him conduct it in person some 30 years ago. Here, with the RIAS Symphony, he will be vulnerable to complaints that, for all his energy and efficiency, he dispatches the piece in too unsentimental and businesslike a way, but some listeners may find it quite bracing. Around this time, he recorded the Three-Cornered Hat Dances with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Although there is really nothing “wrong” here, that recording is superior to this one in detail and refinement of execution. The other two selections on the disc, however, are right up his alley, really superb performances—if only they could have been done stereophonically! In the Bacchus and Ariadne Suite, his nervous energy and rhythmic drive absolutely animate the piece (not that it needs much help) and, although I have not heard his Lamoureux Orchestra recording in many years, I have a strong suspicion that it doesn’t measure up to this one—the Berliners pour it on and even hold their own with the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia (and I admire the Munch, Martinon, and Ormandy recordings). Unlike those of Munch and Ormandy, this one is uncut.

Mussorgsky has to be one of the great songwriters of the 19th century. Many of his 63 songs resemble folk songs. I like Leonard Altman’s explanation in an LP annotation: “Strongly inclined toward building a national style, Mussorgsky’s task was that of creating art music for a people whose natural channel of musical communication was the folk-song; the Russians were a people unaccustomed either by nature, tradition, or experience to ‘culture-music.’ That he succeeded in retaining the color and flavor of the folk idiom, and at the same time created an art music of significance to his own people as well as to the entire world, was his triumph.” During the early 1960s, Markevitch recorded his own orchestration of six Mussorgsky songs in Moscow with Galina Vishnevskaya. That performance, a very fine one, has been reissued on a two-CD set devoted to Mussorgsky’s music but, as far as I can determine, the first song, Lullabye, is missing from the reissue. In 1962, with Vishnevskaya in even better voice, he led the BBC Symphony in a superb performance that was eventually issued on CD and had better sound and playing (“had,” because it seems to have been deleted). Both of the Vishnevskaya recordings were stereophonic. Unlike some modern orchestrators of music of the past, Markevitch seems to have been more interested in serving Mussorgsky, actually enhancing the songs, than showing us how clever he could be. I was skeptical about this 1952 mono broadcast. Who was Mascia Predit? It turns out that she was a 40-year-old Latvian soprano who had at one time studied with Feodor Chaliapin. It also turns out that she had a rich voice of the Slavic type without the unpleasant edge that can seep into the top of the range and she absolutely relishes the text without destroying the melodic line. In a word, she’s terrific, and while the dynamic range is a bit more level than that of the other two recordings, the orchestra comes through clearly and plays beautifully. I also wouldn’t have minded if she were just a shade further from the mike, but, given the artistry on display here, that is a piddling point. Trivia: she appeared as a Russian tourist in the film, “Death in Venice,” under the name “Masha Predit,” and sang snatches of the Mussorgsky Lullabye, while sitting in a beach chair. I seldom make assertions of this sort but I think the six Songs may be worth the price of the disc, and you will get one heck of a Bacchus and Ariadne Suite too.

Using short, potent motives, Janáček’s two string quartets communicate emotional states—foreboding, frenzied activity, anguish, and breakdown, along with moments of sweetness, nostalgia, and occasional ecstacy—with the same dramatic intensity as his operas. Both quartets share melodic material with Káťa Kabanová (1921) and the first quartet, the “Kreutzer Sonata” from 1923, based on Tolstoy, shares its Russian setting and the theme of the mistreatment of its heroine.

In the even less musically conventional second quartet, “Intimate Letters” from 1928, the “hero” is Janáček himself, expressing his unreturned passion for Kamila Stössel. Decades ago, these pieces were off the beaten path, with older Czech quartets offering the most fully realized performances. Now, like Janáček’s piano music and violin sonata, they are mainstream repertoire, recorded by many international quartets, though still a specialty of the best, newer Czech groups like the Talich, Prazák, Skámpa, Panocha, and Pavel Haas quartets.

The Mandelring Quartet, a young German quartet, plays them with near-perfect intonation, razor-sharp articulation, and very precise ensemble in these highly recommendable performances. Their playing is showcased by the very vivid sound of Audite’s SACD recording in which the miking pinpoints the exact location of each player. A perfectly adequate version by the Vlach quartet on Naxos seems lackluster after hearing the Mandelring disc with its superior recorded sound and string playing with technique to spare. The older, venerable Smetana Quartet seems restrained by comparison. My favorite recording, by the Janáček Quartet, offers something less overwrought than the edgy, modern norm in these pieces, more sense of dialogue between the instruments and of space between events.

Along with its extraordinary recorded sound, the Mandelring’s disc stands out among a surplus of excellent versions of these works for including an alternate version of the second quartet. Janáček originally scored “Intimate Letters” for viola d’amore in place of the standard viola, and here, violist Gunter Teuffel performs on the actual instrument that Janáček knew—it belonged to Rudolf Reissig, a violin professor at the Brno Organ School from 1903 to 1909—in a reconstructed version of the quartet.

Aside from an obvious change in which the first movement opens with pizzicato instead of arco playing from the violins, the revisions are hard to hear. What’s fascinating is how the gentler timbre of the viola d’amore, often the work’s melodic protagonist, sweetens the tone of Janáček declarations of love. The other instruments react with adjustments to their volume and the general effect is less fierce than with the more projected voice of the normal viola. If you love this piece, the viola d’amore version gives insight into what Janáček imagined, but it’s very subtle and I wouldn’t call it a revelation.

I recently attended an excellent concert by the French Diotima Quartet in which “Intimate Letters” was programmed together with Alban Berg’s 1925–26 Lyric Suite, a pairing that makes great sense since the two works are roughly contemporaneous and both have secret romantic dedications. Seeing these two dynamic pieces by two master opera composers performed made them more exciting and accessible than any recording. The Diotima has recorded both versions of “Intimate Letters.”

Very little that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau ever sang was perfunctory and, over a career spanning more than 40 years, it was usually well sung, but the years before 1975 caught him in fresher, brighter voice. Thus, this 1971 Berlin concert of Mahler songs finds him in particularly good form, and his interaction with Daniel Barenboim produces interpretations of great sensitivity as well as drama. For some reason I’ve never understood, Barenboim always played better when he accompanied Fischer-Dieskau than at any other time or in any other venue, and such is the case here.

The programming is a bit odd: three of the early Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit, then the two Rückert songs, the complete Songs of a Wayfarer, then one more of the Lieder und Gesänge, ending with the seven excerpts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. It works, but I don’t see why he didn’t do all four of the Jugendzeit Lieder as a group. Fischer-Dieskau is in excellent voice—this was a year or two before the voice really began to dry out—despite one or two pushed high notes early on. The sound quality is stunning, the voice and piano having natural hall acoustic and reverberance. You almost feel as if you are in the hall when listening to this disc.

Interpretively, there are no surprises except that most of the songs are taken at leisurely tempos that allow him to make some particularly interesting points in the lyrical sections. It’s an excellent recital all round. The liner notes, as usual, exalt the singer to a pedestal above all other Lieder singers as the epitome of German art, a pedestal that Fischer-Dieskau himself always found an uncomfortable perch (see his autobiographies). As I’ve mentioned in earlier reviews, yes, he was wonderful, but Karl Erb, Aksel Schiøtz, and Hans Hotter all preceded him as Lieder singers who combined sensitive word coloring with a clean, unmannered musical approach. It was Walter Legge who turned him from a very fine Lieder singer into an icon who was supposedly sina qua non in the history of singing.

Rafael Kubelík’s performances of the Mahler First, particularly the 1968 studio recording that is the Penguin Guide’s top choice and has earned a rosette from Gramophone, are familiar to many collectors. I must admit, however, not being a fan of that studio recording for several reasons. First, the phrasing always seemed to me choppy and phlegmatic, having too much rhetoric and not enough of a focused overview of the work. Second, the recorded sound is particularly harsh, dry, and two-dimensional, cramping the almost 3-D effect that Mahler achieved in nearly all of his symphonies. And third, despite the obvious energy he brought to the symphony, Kubelík always seemed to me less engaged in his studio recordings than he was live, a trait that also afflicts his highly praised 1967 studio recording of Die Meistersinger. The orchestra plays with lilt and grace, the singers all interpret their roles beautifully, yet somehow it all sounds like a hothouse flower.

This live performance from 1979, then, attracted my attention immediately when I saw it was available for review. Unfortunately, it suffers from exactly the opposite virtues and defects of his studio account. On the positive side the symphony, though well inflected with little ritards and touches of rubato, makes a lot more sense here and seems less arbitrary, except in the latter half of the third movement. Kubelík is also really into the music, creating real atmosphere, particularly in the long, slow peroration in the first movement and the melancholy third. But the sound is the opposite of boxy: It’s far too roomy, the orchestra sounding as if it were recorded in the old Astrodome with the roof open and a hot Texas breeze scattering the minute details of the score to the four winds. In short, every musical climax poofs away in a flaccid, soft-grained mushroom of sound. As you can imagine, this is a tremendous detriment to the finale of the first movement and most of the fourth.

It’s a pity, really, but what can you do? Kubelík is gone now, and so can’t return to remake the symphony under more ideal conditions. If you are a Kubelík completist, however, you’ll want it as a fine example of what he could achieve with this symphony under good musical conditions with an orchestra he really loved. To say that Audite’s packaging is cheap is an understatement. Both the front and back covers feature a photo of a twig with yellow-brown, dying leaves. The back cover gives you the only information on this performance: composer, title of work, conductor’s name, orchestra, city of origin, and recording date. Inside there is nothing except an 83-page, full-color catalog of Audite CDs, which you can’t even take out because it’s firmly glued in place. I’ve seen supermarket classical CDs better than this.

It’s really a pity that this disc is just a reissue of a performance previously available in DGG’s set of complete Mahler symphonies conducted by Kubelík, as there’s so much I’d like to say about it that’s probably already been said, so I shall reduce my comments to the minimum.

Being personally very fussy in regard to symphonies including singers, I’ll automatically reject performances with defective voices even if the conducting is considered to be the best ever. For this reason, I don’t own the otherwise fantastic performances by Jascha Horenstein and Klaus Tennstedt, and never will, just as I don’t own or even listen to most recordings of the Beethoven Ninth made after, say, 1980. Solti’s famous studio recording of this Mahler symphony had, perhaps, the best eight singers amassed in one place, but they were recorded separately from the orchestra, which created a flat, two-dimensional sound I find offensive. That being said, I am partial to the recordings by Leopold Stokowski (1950), Bernard Haitink (the earlier recording with Cotrubas, Harper, and Prey), and Antoni Wit, in which the defective voices are, to my ears, less annoying than in the others, and generally just one bad voice per ensemble.

The fact that Kubelík, who never pushed his name or fame and in fact retreated from a publicity machine, was able to entice these eight outstanding singers to Munich for this performance says a lot for how much he was respected as a musician. The one name not universally feted at the time was tenor Donald Grobe, and ironically he produces the finest singing of this very difficult music I’ve ever heard (James King with Solti notwithstanding). Kubelík also managed to get truly involved and exciting singing out of Martina Arroyo, and that in itself is a miracle. (He did the same with Gundula Janowitz in his studio recording of Die Meistersinger, though overall his conducting on that set, like most of his conducting in a studio environment, lacks the full power and emotional commitment of his live work). Sometimes the singers are a little off-mike, coming only out of the left or right speakers, but that’s a condition of the original microphone setup and can’t be changed.

Undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of this performance is its full-speed-ahead tempos, particularly in “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” which Kubelík dispatches in a mere 21 minutes. (Don’t believe the designation of 21:30 on the CD box; 25 seconds of that is silence with audience coughing before part II.) But, shockingly, it doesn’t sound terribly rushed most of the time, there are few dropped notes, and the whole thing has the ecstatic quality of a satori. If you happen to be allergic to fast tempos in Mahler, then, this recording is not for you, but if that’s not a problem you’ll find this the greatest Mahler Eighth ever issued. I’ve hereby retired the Haitink recording from my collection; good as it is, it doesn’t have Kubelík’s overwhelming emotional impact. Since not every performance in the Kubelík set is of equal quality (no conductor’s integral set is consistently great), I encourage you to add this disc to your collection. Audite’s 24-bit remastering brings out every detail of this performance with stunning warmth and clarity. I’d compare the sound favorably to any all-digital Eighth on the market.

[...] Audite’s compilation of Berlin recordings made by Michael Rabin, both live (Bruch, 6/16–17, 1969) and in the studio (Weiniawski, Tchaikovsky, and Sarasate, 6/12/1969, and Saint-Saëns, 10/30/1962) claims to be complete (although DOREMI’s pieces by Milhaud and Szymanowski, attributed to Berlin, don’t appear here). It represents, then, another set of recordings to stand beside EMI’s “Michael Rabin, 1936–1972,” EMI 64123, 15:5, and occasional collections like “Mosaics” on EMI 67020, 22:5, Sony’s “Michael Rabin: The Early Years”—with “Ossy Renardy Plays Sarasate and Paganini,” Sony Masterworks Heritage 60894, 23:2, and DOREMI’s collection of live performances (DOREMI 7715, 24:1 and the one under consideration in this review). Audite’s note relates that the company’s historical recordings come from original analog master tapes. The Bruch Concerto, also included in DOREMI’s set, certainly sounds pristine, and Audite’s effort presents it in cleaner, more vibrant recorded sound. Rabin had recorded Kroll’s sparkling miniature (also a Heifetz favorite), Banjo and Fiddle, with Artur Balsam for Columbia in 1952. Sony re-released that recording in the collection mentioned above. Rabin must have liked Wieniawski’s Caprice, op. 18/4, because he recorded it with Balsam at the same time as the Kroll encore in 1952 and later with Leon Pommers. The soaring reading of Tchaikovsky’s Méditation, however, represents a new addition to Rabin’s discography, available perhaps for the first time in the United States. Rabin’s sound here has a somewhat sharp edge (as it does in all these later Berlin recordings), though its sumptuousness should still be identifiable.

Rabin had recorded the finale of Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy in 1952 for Columbia in the above-mentioned sessions, and that recording once again has been re-released in Sony’s collection cited above. In Berlin, however, Rabin recorded the entire Fantasy, and it’s a bracing reading, combining technical and tonal panache, recorded closely enough to reveal all the nuances of Rabin’s tone and performance, by turns sultry, soaring, and startlingly brilliant. He’d recorded Sarasate’s Habanera and Zapateado in 1959 with Leon Pommers, so the Berlin readings of the two works come just 10 years later (and include the Malagueña, which, once again, seems to be new to his discography). Malagueña sounds suave in its opening section, although perhaps a bit unstable rhythmically during the pizzicato section, though it is seductively smoldering overall. Sarasate himself recorded his own Habanera in 1904, but that quicksilver recording hasn’t served as a model for the more aggressive ones that have followed. In 1969, Rabin’s overall approach seemed almost identical with that from 1959, and his running dash to the conclusion makes, if anything, an even more brilliant conclusion, perhaps because he’s been miked more closely. Rabin makes a few unpleasant noises in Zapateado, but otherwise it’s a spirited reading (one that, once again, recalls in its brilliance and expressive nuance, the earlier and more polished performance from 1959), with another mad dash in the final measures.

Rabin recorded Havanaise with the Philharmonia Orchestra on 6/12/1956, but the reading from 1962, with Broddack at the piano, reveals the piece in another guise, since the orchestral part seems so important texturally to the work’s effect. Here, Rabin’s sound dominates the discrete piano part as it almost did the orchestral accompaniment by Alceo Galliera and the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1958. Rabin had an insinuating way with Saint-Saëns’s Spanish pieces, which he seemed to project with a grandeza that others missed.

Because the collection presents Rabin in repertoire in which many collectors may not have heard him, and because of Audite’s pristine recorded sound, every admirer must acquire this collection, not least in search of the answer to the by now burning question: was Rabin making a comeback? Urgently recommended.

Finally, Rabin’s followers will have to obtain Anthony Feinstein’s biography of Rabin. As that great violinist slips into the past, his family members pass away, and the memories fade for those who once vividly remembered hearing the young virtuoso on the radio, it seems less and less likely that anyone will be able to write about Rabin more authoritatively than has Dr. Feinstein, a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. A character study that might appeal to a broad cross section of readers, the book also provides a great deal of detail not only about Rabin’s interaction with his demanding mother, but also about his relationships with Ivan Galamian and with the great violinists of his era, including an especially touching one with Zino Francescatti. And since collectors will find such a great deal of information about the provenance of the recordings they have treasured—and will treasure—the book could serve as an extended set of program notes for DOREMI’s new release of live performances, as well as for the sets that Sony, EMI, and Audite have re-released on CD. In fact, the emergence of live performances from his later years makes the book particularly relevant anew, for it will provide listeners with evidentiary performances that will suggest answers to the eternal question about Rabin—did he really have a chance at reinvigorating his career? No longer need his fans, still grieving after 37 years, try to read between the lines of comments like Henry Roth’s or Arnold Steinhardt’s. And if these recordings don’t answer the question with perfect certainty, reading the book along with them provides a richer context for decision making.

Violinists who write about themselves often neglect (or decline) to tell much about their playing and their recordings. Perhaps they’ve been discouraged from doing so by publishers. And perhaps they’re just weary of shop-talk, even if it’s about themselves. That’s also a common shortcoming in books written by non-violinists: too much biography (“Then Harry said to Moe, ‘Let’s give this guy a contract.’”) and too little information on violin-playing and recordings, which, even if they could elicit it, these writers often couldn’t begin to understand. It’s obvious that Feinstein appreciated Rabin’s significance and that his appreciation led him through the book. It’s also obvious that he consulted violinists and other musicians as conscientiously as he consulted family members, and analyzed their comments just as insightfully. If this isn’t the best book about a violinist among the ones I’ve read, I don’t know what is. Urgently recommended.

This year’s wants bear connections to the greatest of the great violinists. Dynamic’s eight-CD set offers a synoptic view of Paganini’s works for violin and orchestra. Even without the support of Paganini’s demonic presence, the pieces, heard one after another, still pack quite a wallop. If Paganini wasn’t the greatest violinist of all time, that mantle should fall on Heifetz. Both pioneers transformed violin playing—and we can actually hear how Heifetz did it in this overwhelming and affordable collection. Perhaps arguably, Michael Rabin showed such promise as well; and DOREMI’s set allows us to answer some of the persistent questions about what his later violin playing might have been like had his comeback not been cut short, while Audite offers material equally intriguing. So what’s teenager Caroline Goulding doing here? Well, she simply plays as though she belongs here—and that’s enough.

This release offers radio performances recorded in1949 and should not be confused with the fine account led by Fricsay four years later for Deutsche Grammophon. Granted there are many similarities between the two. Rita Streich and Josef Greindl sang the same roles in both recordings. Then, too, Fricsay’s conducting did not vary significantly from this account to the later one. But a major asset of the DG version is the superb singing of Maria Stader as Konstanza, a projection as musical, powerful, and technically commanding as any ever recorded. Indeed, her “Martern aller Arten” is a paradigm of what this extraordinary “quadruple concerto,” as Sir Donald Tovey tagged it, comprises. Conversely, in this earlier account, both Barabas and Streich sound a bit thin—Barabas, even somewhat shrill. Part of this may result from a recording that, in its sonic harshness and metallic string tone, typifies many pre-stereo radio tapes. In addition, as was the custom in studio recordings of that era, the aria for Belmonte that Mozart intended as an act III opener (No. 17 in the Peters score) is omitted. (In a splendid stereo account, Sir Colin Davis includes it.) Fricsay also varies the sequence of events in act II, reversing the order of Nos. 15 and 16. In 1998, DG reissued his later effort on CD. In short, although this Audite set provides a fine example of Fricsay’s affinity for this opera, it is no match, sonically or vocally, for that later DG production, which remains available from arkivmusic.com. Audite includes no libretto, but provides ample tracking information and extensive trilingual notes. German dialogue is delivered by professional actors. In general the prevailing aura is that of the studio, not the theater.