David Oistrakh’s “Concertos++” Recordings

David Oistrakh (photograph taken at a 1954 performance in Dresden, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license)

In continuing my examination of the 31 CDs classified as Premières, Rarities & Live Performances in the Warner Remastered Edition box set collection of recordings of performances by Russian violinist David Oistrakh, the above “Concerto++” was conceived to account for not only the concerto genre but also chamber music with piano. (String quartets will be examined in the next article.) This accounts for seven CDs, three for chamber music and the other four for the concertante genre. The timeline is a wide one, with Johann Sebastian Bach at one end and Paul Hindemith at the other. As with my previous account of the “Rarities” category, I shall try to account for this one through categories, all of which are relatively modest in size.

The largest of those categories accounts for performances of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This consists of one album of sonatas (with two different accompanists, Lev Oborin and Vladimir Yampolsky), a “concertante and chamber music” album, and one that couples a concerto (K. 218 in D major) with concertos of Jean Sibelius and Henri Vieuxtemps, all with piano accompaniment. Personally, I was satisfied with the light touch that Oistrakh takes to Mozart, particularly when performing with his two accompanists, Lev Oborin and Vladimir Yampolsky. He clearly had a playful side, which is less evident in the more “serious” performances in this collection.

His Bach repertoire consists of four duo sonatas (BWV 1015 in A major, BWV 1016 in E major, BWV 1018 in F minor, and BWV 1019 in G major) and two concertos (BWV 1041 in A minor and the “Brandenburg” BWV 1049 in G major). These may not be “historically informed;” but they are given clear and expressive accounts that would have satisfied listeners in the Fifties. Where the nineteenth century is concerned, I was particularly glad to encounter Ernest Chausson’s Opus 21, his “Concert” scored for violin, piano, and string quartet. I also appreciated Oistrakh’s interest in Claude Debussy, even if he could only approach his music through violin-piano arrangements by Alexandre Roelens.

In many respects, this is a “usual suspects” collection with a certain nineteenth-century bias towards Max Bruch, represented by both his Opus 26 (first) concerto in G minor and his more familiar Opus 46 “Scottish Fantasy” in E-flat major. With the notable exception of Hindemith, many listeners will associate this collection with the repertoire of Jascha Heifetz; but that should be no surprise. The two of them were contemporaries born in Russia; but Oistrakh remained in Russia, eventually to be honored as a People’s Artist of the USSR  in 1953. Heifetz may have the broader recording legacy, but there is still much to be gained in examining Oistrakh’s “alternative” perspective on repertoire.