Henryk Szeryng’s SWR Concerto Recordings

courtesy of Naxos of America

Readers may recall my enthusiasm for SWR Classic, the “house label” of the Southwest German Radio (SWR) Symphony Orchestra based in Baden-Baden when I wrote about the eight-CD collection of performances of the music of Gustav Mahler conducted by Hans Rosbaud this past September. About two months ago SWR Classic released another collection in its Historic Recording series. This one consists of only five CDs and is devoted entirely to concerto performances by violinist Henryk Szeryng.

Readers with longer memories may also recall that I wrote at some length about Szeryng during the first quarter of 2019 after Decca honored the centennial of Szeryng’s birth by compiling a 44-CD box set collecting all of the recordings that he made for Philips, Mercury, and Deutsche Grammophon (DG). Therefore, it is only fair for me to report that all of the concertos in the SWR Classic collection can be found in the Decca release (where four of them appear twice, concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johannes Brahms). That said, there are at least several occasions in which the SWR performances are more adventurous than what one encounters on the more popular labels.

Consider the following sentence from my account of the Decca collection:

Nevertheless, in May of 1988 he [Szeryng] had a session with DG [Deutsche Grammophon] to record Alban Berg’s violin concerto, suggesting that he was always interested in expanding his repertoire.

The fact is that, long before he went into the DG studio, in November of 1957, Szeryng had recorded the Berg concerto in Studio V of the Baden-Baden facility, working with Ernest Bour conducting the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. My guess is that Bour’s name will be unfamiliar to most readers, but he was Rosbaud’s successor as Principal Conductor of that ensemble (the same ensemble with which Rosbaud had made his Mahler recordings). Indeed Bour has a dominating presence in the Szeryng collection, conducting not only Berg but also Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Brahms. (Bour also conducted that ensemble in the recording of György Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” for the soundtrack of 2001.)

It is also worth noting that Szeryng’s recordings of Bach and Mozart were made at a time before critics started to discuss seriously matters of historically-informed performance. Thus, while Bour was one of Szeryng’s Mozart conductors, another was Paul Sacher, who also conducted Bach’s BWV 1042 concerto in E major. Sacher tended to be most at home on the podium of a chamber orchestra; and, while he is better known for commissioning works by well-known twentieth-century composers, he also knew that “chamber scale” was more suited to both Bach and Mozart than the larger ensembles led by the more familiar conductors of the last century. Similarly, BWV 1041 in A minor is conducted by Karl Ristenpart, who has a major legacy of Bach recordings that anticipated historically-informed insights that would only emerge to the general public after his death in 1967.

The fact is that, while Szeryng could please the general public listening audience when he went into the studios of Philips, Mercury, and DG, SWR allowed him to take a more adventurous stance in both repertoire and interpretative style during the recording sessions hosted between 1956 and 1984.