Another wonderful disc in Audite’s archival RIAS series. Leo Blech is best known for his many fine recordings on 78s before the war; this disc provides a rare, and exceedingly welcome, opportunity to hear him after his return to Berlin in 1949 (the Jewish Blech had spent the war years first in Russia, then Sweden). His ignoring by the record companies after the war, though thoroughly regrettable, can probably be attributed to his age (he was 79 by the time of this concert, and would live until 1958).

The performance of the “Great C Major” captured here is nothing short of a revelation, extraordinary for a man of any age. The introduction is richly pliable, full of imaginatively molded details and with an arresting quality of “speaking” declamation. In the Allegro ma non troppo, he seems to devour the music whole in long, fluid paragraphs. The tempo is flexible, with an extreme volatility in the expanses of the second theme, accelerating by its end to a speed far beyond the initial Allegro. The long sequences of the development have a rare visceral excitement. Orchestral balances are lean and sharp, and the players’ response to his galvanizing direction has real bite. The Andante con moto bursts with dramatic life and heightened rhetoric—hear the spontaneous volatility of the main theme’s contrasting middle section (Rehearsal A ff.), or the amazing life-or-death intensity with which he invests the two-chord motive at 7 before D, etc. The lyrical second theme is shaped with tactile immediacy. At the movement’s central climax, his accelerando is disconcertingly extreme, yet of a piece with his heightened conception of the whole. The Scherzo is lean and fiery; the Trio forward-pressing with little relaxation. The edifice is capped by a big-boned and weighty finale, flexible within a controlled master tempo, with biting accents and long-breathed shaping of paragraphs. Altogether a fascinating contrast with Furtwängler’s postwar performances of the work, with their very different brand of interpretive freedom, but every bit as compelling.

The Chopin concerto is no less welcome, for a reminder of the quality of the near-forgotten Julian von Károlyi, who plays the work with a rare incisiveness, thrust, and exciting Hungarian rhythmic snap. His sound is on the dry side, using very little pedal, with agile reflexes and precision at high speed (exceptionally clean fioriture). Musical gestures are economical, but there is a coil-spring inner tension to his phrasing, and he has that rare knack of suggesting a lot while seeming to do very little. Blech’s conducting is dynamic and involved (unusually for the time, he plays the opening ritornello complete; curiously, he observes a much shorter cut at the end of the movement).

As usual, Audite’s production values are superb; the sound, transferred from the original master tapes, is of astounding vividness, color, clarity, and dynamic range for its time and provenance. An altogether exceptional disc, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if this were to wind up in my next Want List.

These recordings circulated for decades on budget labels and perhaps for that reason are likely to be overlooked or undervalued. They are splendid examples of what Klemperer could do with German repertoire (what could he not?). They are less eccentric than his earlier and later work and of particular value for that reason alone: they have always served as benchmarks, not only for Klemperer but for anyone else in this repertoire. Here is a great conductor at the height of his powers reissued in handsome packaging and improved sound.

Now that Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata has entered the mainstream repertoire, a common interpretation of it has emerged. The timings of each movement in these two performances are only a few seconds apart, and the biggest difference is in the middle movement, where Ingolfsson and Stoupel clock in at 6:29 to Kutik and Bozarth’s 7:00. The conservatories and universities are probably teaching this sonata now, so a good, workable interpretation circulates from teacher to student, and from musician to musician through concerts, records, and radio. This is certainly not a bad thing. It establishes an interpretive “floor”, so to speak, that performers generally don’t sink beneath. Most of the music we hear is played in standard interpretations.

The Soviet-born Yevgeny Kutik is more sensitive to the oppressive mood of the Shostakovich sonata and makes many more well-considered nuances than Ingolfsson does. Listen to Ingolfsson’s expressionless playing in the second subject of I and compare it with Kutik’s more bumpy, angular phrasing. Still, the greatest Shostakovich Violin Sonata that I’ve ever heard remains the amazing performance by the young brother-sister duo of Sergei and Lusine Khachatryan (July/Aug 2008).

Ingolfsson’s playing in Stravinsky’s Divertimento is not much better. Just compare the opening bars of the Sinfonia with the magic spell chanted by Cho-Liang Lin and Andre- Michel Schub in their classic recording. This isn’t a bad interpretation, but it is pedestrian.

Alfred Schnittke’s Violin Sonata 1, written in 1963, is obviously cut from the same cloth as the Shostakovich. While Schnittke’s signature polystylism is especially evident in the hymnlike tune at the end of the Largo and the pop tune-like dance at the start of the finale, a dark mood prevails, with much acerbic humor, if this can even be called humor.

It is interesting that Kutik would program the two works by Joseph Achron in a program titled Sounds of Defiance—the famous Hebrew Melody of 1911 and the Hebrew Lullaby of 1913. Achron was born in Russia in 1886. He certainly must have been aware of the horrible pogroms. He left the Soviet Union in 1922, never to return. Arvo Part’s Mirror in the Mirror, written in 1978, is a minimalist work with a vaguely religious atmosphere.

This is the first time I have heard Kutik, and I hope it will not be the last. He is always thinking, always playing the music, not just the notes.

Audite’s program of violin concertos by Ludwig van Beethoven and Alban Berg captures two moments in the life of Christian Ferras, the first a studio recording from November 19, 1951, made in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche after the 18-year-old violinist had given a live performance of the work at the Titania Palast and more than a decade before he would record the work with Herbert von Karajan and the same orchestra. The young Ferras sounds both flexible and sprightly in the first movement’s passagework, producing a suave tone that might be described as almost gustatory in its effect as he soars above the orchestra. That tone lacks the sharp edge of Zino Francescatti’s and even the slightly reedy quality of Arthur Grumiaux’s, and he never seems to be deploying it simply for the sheer beauty of it: As sumptuous as it might sound, it always serves his high-minded concept of the work itself. And his playing of Fritz Kreisler’s famous cadenza similarly subordinates virtuosity to musical effect. Karl Böhm sets the mood for a probing exploration of the slow movement, in which Ferras sounds similarly committed; he never allows himself to be diverted into mannerism or eccentricity, as Anne-Sophie Mutter does in her performance with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon 289 471 349, Fanfare 26:5 and 26:6). What the young Michael Rabin achieved in the showpieces of Wieniawski and Paganini, Ferras arguably exceeded in the music of Beethoven. The finale’s passagework allows Ferras to snap his bow authoritatively (and rhythmically), while without creating nary a soupçon of virtuosic frisson ; Böhm, despite his elevated conception of the stamping orchestral part, never severs the music’s contact with earth. Böhm, in fact, proves himself a profoundly sympathetic collaborator, while the engineers provide well-balanced recorded sound that represents the variety and splendor of Ferras’s tonal palette and the full weight of the orchestra. Overall, it’s a monumental performance.

The live reading of Alban Berg’s Concerto came more than a decade later, when Ferras had not quite yet reached the age of 33. Ferras’s recording of the concerto, paired with Igor Stravinsky’s, appeared on Claves SO-2516 in a live performance from Geneva in 1957 with Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande Orchestra, Fanfare 32:4 (he would record the work in the studio in 1963 with Georges Prêtre and the Paris Conservatory Orchestra). Although the timings of the first section differ by only a few seconds between live performances, the later one with Massimo Freccia seems more forward-moving (I noted the almost static quality of the earlier reading in my review in 32:4), although both parts of the first movement nevertheless sound moody, if not gloomy—and atmospheric, if not surreal—in this reading with Freccia, and the engineers have captured it with striking fidelity. Listeners who remember the powerful effect of recordings of Berg’s Concerto by Arthur Grumiaux (from 1967, reissued on Decca Eloquence 480 0481, Fanfare 34:1), and André Gertler (reissued on Hungaroton 31635) might begin to wonder whether the Franco-Belgian manner might not, perhaps paradoxically, be uncannily suited to Berg’s temperament. The last page of the end of the first movement epitomizes the dreaminess yet desperation that Ferras manages to project. He’s equally at home in the tumult of the second movement’s opening section, representing the violin’s part in the catastrophe with ferocious intensity and the moments of remission with eerie calm. In the final section, based on one of Bach’s most chromatically harmonized chorales, he ascends from moments that seem intentionally lethargic, to reach a shattering conclusion and a sublimely untroubled dénouement. Massimo Freccia seems to share Ferras’s view of the concerto’s dramatic design, not only overall but in detail.

Despite the unquestionable depth and technical command evidenced in these readings, Ferras never became a household name in the United States, even among violinists, and several reference works give him only scant if any mention. Still, it’s hard to imagine that these recordings could sound too French, or too slick, or, in fact, too anything, to capture listeners’ imagination. And perhaps now the reissue of recordings like these will give collectors something to treasure, thereby effectively offering him a second chance at the general fame he seemed to deserve. Urgently recommended, as a recording of special merit.

These are world premiere recordings of two string quintets, Opuses 15 and 51, by German composer Eduard Franck (1817-93). He certainly knows how to write for this medium. Each voice is given its own space so that its function always comes through clearly, especially with the warm, superbly balanced engineering here, and with these players, whose tuning, rhythm, and ensemble is so perfect one would think they play as a unit all the time. They also give superb forward movement to both works. My only criticism of them is that they favor forte volume so often that their gorgeous sound becomes wearing much of the time, especially when the music is of lesser interest.

That’s the main problem with Opus 15. Franck has learned structure and form from his best contemporaries, particularly Mendelssohn (with whom he studied) and Schubert, but here he doesn’t have enough creative ideas to make the work distinctive. In lesser hands some of his harmonic progressions would become really tiresome. His ideas become tedious because they’re not inventive enough to endure the length. Or, to put it bluntly, at some point in each of the four movements I finally said, “Enough already”.

Opus 51 has more substance. Its inner lines pulse with life as the players bring out leading voices, even though II reminds me that Franck writes mainly for the two violins; while strong on form, he doesn’t write much counterpoint. The Scherzo is very nice, and the theme-and-variations finale has the cleverest, loveliest, most inventive writing on the album—which says a lot because the the-me-and- variations form is often the deadliest for even the best composers (just ask Schubert or Beethoven).

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