1950 photograph of violinist Joseph Szigeti (from the Cushing Memorial Library of Texas A&M University, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
After several delays, all of which were probably due to the impact of COVID-19 on “business as usual,” Sony Classical finally released its anthology Joseph Szigeti: The Complete Columbia Album Collection about a month ago. Szigeti, a Hungarian violinist, was a leading figure during the twentieth century. He was a notable colleague of Ferruccio Busoni, Béla Bartok, Ernest Bloch, and Eugène Ysaÿe, the last of whom dedicated his first solo violin sonata to him. (Ysaÿe’s Opus 27 is a collection of six solo sonatas, each of which is dedicated to a different virtuoso violinist reflecting the respective composer’s style.)
The very first CD in the Sony collection is probably the best reflection of these connections. It begins with the first of Bartók’s two virtuoso rhapsodies, originally composed for violin and piano and subsequently arranged for violin and orchestra. Bartók wrote this piece for Szigeti, and Columbia recorded the two of them performing the composition on May 2, 1940. The following May 13 they returned to the World Broadcasting Studios in New York, this time joined by clarinetist Benny Goodman, to perform what is probably the most authoritative account of Bartók’s three-movement “Contrasts.”
While the collection does not include the concerto that Bloch wrote for Szigeti, that first CD also includes his 1923 Baal Shem suite, composed when Bloch was teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Music and given the subtitle “3 Pictures of Chassidic Life.” After these three pieces, however, there is a disappointing lapse in adventurous content. This is particularly disconcerting where the concerto is involved, since Discogs has a Web page for a Columbia vinyl that coupled the Baal Shem performance with one of the Bloch violin concerto played by Szigeti under the baton of Charles Munch conducting the Orchestra De La Société Des Concerts Du Conservatoire in Paris.
On the more positive side, there is a complete account of Szigeti’s performances at the Prades Festival. Based in the Pyrénées-Orientales department in the Occitanie region of Southern France, this festival was launched by cellist Pablo Casals in 1950 to commemorate the bicentenary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, and Columbia provided recordings of the performances at those annual festivals. Of particular interest is the recording from the 1953 festival of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 87 (second) piano trio in C major, with Szigeti joined by Casals on cello and Myra Hess on piano. Hess also accompanied Szigeti in a performance of Franz Schubert’s D. 574 sonata in A major. There are also three recordings of Casals conducting Bach, which are definitely valuable historical documents but are not likely to go down very well with “Bach purists.”
In general, there is much to be said for the company that Szigeti keeps. For my part the deepest impressions come from the recordings he made of the piano and violin sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven (as the composer himself described them) with the piano part taken by Mieczysław Horszowski. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that Horszowski also accompanied Szigeti in a recording of Busoni’s Opus 36a second violin sonata in E minor. This can be found on the penultimate CD in the collection, coupled with Szigeti’s performance of Busoni’s Opus 35a concerto in D major with The Little Orchestra Society conducted by Thomas Scherman.
In other words whatever liabilities there may be in this collection, they are more than sufficiently balanced by a wealth of assets.
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