Friday, March 22, 2019

The Decca Release of Szeryng’s DG Recordings

The remaining eight discs in Decca’s release of a 44-CD box set collection of all of the recordings that violinist Henryk Szeryng made for Philips, Mercury, and Deutsche Grammophon (DG) are the DG sessions that took place between 1967 and 1981. This may not be very much by way of quantity, but it definitely involves some significant departures from the content of the first 36 CDs in the collection. Given my personal tastes, I would attach highest priority to the recording that Szeryng made of Alban Berg’s violin concerto (“To the Memory of an Angel”) with Rafael Kubelík conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

When we review the discography on Kubelík’s Wikipedia page, it is clear that the twentieth century was not his sweet spot. Nevertheless, that century is represented by Paul Hindemith, Béla Bartók, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Berg; and, thanks to my own personal memories, I know that Ernest Bloch can be added to the list with a performance of his first concerto grosso by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His recording of Schoenberg’s Opus 16 set of five pieces for orchestra in Chicago is also overlooked, but the Wikipedia discography does include both the violin concerto and the piano concerto, both, like the Berg concerto, recorded on DG with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. There is even a release that collects all three concertos together on a single album:


Cover design for the album of Kubelík conducting concertos by both Schoenberg and Berg (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

The “bottom line” is that, if the twentieth century was not in Szeryng’s “comfort zone,” his partnership with Kubelík still resulted in one of the most compelling interpretations of Berg’s concerto that I have encountered, clearly focused on the intense expressiveness of the music rather than any of the underlying grammars of atonality.

The other particularly satisfying feature of this collection is the set of four CDs that account for all of Ludwig van Beethoven’s compositions for the trio of violin, cello, and piano. To be fair, however, all four of those CDs can also be found in The Pierre Fournier Edition: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, Decca & Philips, which was discussed on this site in May of 2017. (Wilhelm Kempff was the pianist recording with Szeryng and Fournier.) Furthermore, the Fournier collection adds three more tracks to the final CD for the Opus 11 (“Gassenhauer”) trio, which replaces the violin with a clarinet! My guess is that it was DG’s decision that music so clearly written for clarinet should be played by clarinet (as opposed to Columbia Records, which seems to have been determined to give their customers as much Isaac Stern as they could handle); and I, for one, have no problem with Szeryng’s lacking the opportunity to move in on the “turf” of the clarinet repertoire!

The DG selections are also distinguished by paying more proportionate attention to the pre-Classical repertoire. It is in this portion of the collection that the curious listener will finally encounter the BWV 1001–1006 collection of sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and the two CDs that present this collection make for some very satisfying listening. In addition the very last CD in the box presents the six of the fifteen sonatas from George Frideric Handel’s Opus 1 (HWV 359–373) that were composed for violin and accompaniment. It then concludes with a “bonus track” in the form of the “Folia” variations from the last (twelfth) of Arcangelo Corelli’s Opus 5 sonatas. Accompaniment is provided by harpsichordist Huguette Dreyfus.

In other words, while the eight DG discs may be modest in quantity, they all have a high standard of quality that will appeal to any serious listener.

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