2018 photograph of pianist Martha Argerich and violinist Ivry Gitlis (aged 96 at that time) (photograph by Shani Evenstein, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
At the beginning of this month, Taiwan-based RHINE CLASSICS launched a series of recordings entitled Ivry Gitlis Edition, planned as a collection of recordings of the Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis. Because this name may not be familiar to many readers, I would like to begin with an anecdote. When I was working on my doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, one of my colleagues was the late Gilbert Voyat, a Swiss psychologist with the gift of being able to explain the work of Jean Piaget to those of us with limited knowledge of French. (Voyat died of cancer at the early age of 43, at which time he had been a Professor of Psychology at City College of New York.) Voyat once began a conversation by referring to his friend Ivry Gitlis; and I piped up, “I know who that is!” Voyat scowled, “No one in the United States knows who Gitlis is!” I replied, “Anyone who likes Alban Berg’s violin concerto knows that he is one of the few violinists to have recorded it;” and, in fact, I first came to know that concerto through a Vox recording made with William Strickland conducting the Vienna Symphony.
That conversation took place half a century ago; and, over that intervening period, I have never encountered another recording of Gitlis until this month. The first Ivry Gitlis Edition release is a two-CD collection entitled The Early Years, Birth of a Legend. The recordings remastered on this album were made between 1949 and 1963. All of the selections are either solos or works with piano accompaniment. Thus, while the Berg violin concerto fits into this time frame (the album received a “Grand Prix du Disque” award in 1954), it is not part of the collection. However, even if there is no representation of any of the Second Viennese School composers, there is a wide variety of twentieth-century approaches to composition, represented (in order of appearance in the collection) by Paul Hindemith, Karol Szymanowski, Ernest Bloch, Béla Bartók, and Joseph Achron. All other selections are from the nineteenth century with the exceptions of the Chaconne movement that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor and Giuseppe Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” sonata.
With regard to technology, RHINE CLASSICS has done an excellent remastering job for all of the tracks on these two CDs. The performances themselves are more variable in quality. Each CD includes with its own recording of Bartók’s solo violin sonata. The earlier recording comes from a studio session in Paris in December of 1951. The later recording was recorded live at the 1963 Festival dei Due Mondi (festival of two worlds) in Spoleto, Italy. Without trying to make undue excuses, I have found that even the best of performers are not “at the top of their game” in what I like to call “high-bandwidth” festivals; so I was not surprised to find a better account of Bartók coming out of the studio!
Thus, in spite of “Spoleto conditions,” the greatest satisfaction comes from the attention that Gitlis gives to the twentieth-century composers included in this collection. By way of comparison, only two of the twentieth-century pieces can be found in the discography for Jascha Heifetz, Achron’s 1911 Opus 33 (“Hebrew Melody”) and the “Nigun” movement from Bloch’s 1923 Baal Shem suite. Particularly representative is the fact that the very first composition on the first CD is the third (1935) sonata (in E major) of the four that Hindemith composed for violin and piano. Taking Bloch, Hindemith, and Bartók all into account, this collection is definitely worth “the price of admission.”
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