David Oistrakh on Warner: Mostly Eastern Europe

As I gradually work my way to the conclusion in writing about the Warner Remastered Edition box set collection of recordings of performances by Russian violinist David Oistrakh, I shall now focus on the “national” CDs, most of which involve music from Eastern Europe with a single Italy & Spain CD serving as an “outlier.” I find this latter CD to be particularly interesting, since the “Italy” portion covers the transition from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, with composers Giovanni Battista Vitali, Antonio Vivaldi, Giuseppe Tartini, and Pietro Antonio Locatelli, while “Spain” runs from the end to the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The contrast between these two countries could not be stronger, but curator Bruno Monsaingeon seems to have decided that they would make good “bedfellows.” (Those that have been following my articles for this collection will probably already know about my “issues” with Monsaingeon.)

Three of the CDs in this collection involve Russian composers, with Sergei Prokofiev receiving the most attention. Nevertheless, I was a bit disappointed that he was represented by only the first (opus 19 in D major) of his two violin concertos. All the other Prokofiev selections were arrangements by Grigoriy Mikhailovich Fichtenholz (five episodes from the Cinderella ballet), Vadim Borisovsky (pieces from the Romeo and Juliet ballet), and Jascha Heifetz (the march from the opera The Love for Three Oranges). The only other familiar concerto represented is Alexander Glazunov’s Opus 82 in A minor, and the only other major composition is Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Opus 35 symphonic suite Scheherazade, in which the violin serves as the “voice” of Scheherazade telling her stories. However, there are two decidedly less familiar concertante offerings from the twentieth century by Otar Taktakishvili and Nikolai Rakov, neither of which make for much of a lasting impression.

Composer Bohuslav Martinů working on his second symphony (probably) in 1942 (photographer unknown, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Czech Republic license)

There is also a “Czechoslovakia” CD, which is, for the most part, a grab-bag of excerpts. Nevertheless, I was glad to see that an entire sonata by Bohuslav Martinů (his third, H. 303)  was included. His catalog of chamber music is particularly generous, and I find it more than a little unfortunately that Oistrakh did not give him more attention. The remaining CD is an “Eastern Europe” grab-bag. It includes arrangements of selections from Johannes Brahms’ WoO 1 Hungarian Dances collection by both Joseph Joachim and Fritz Kreisler. Unless I am mistaken, the most recent composition on this CD that is the “Moldavian Rhapsody” by Mieczysław Weinberg, the third of the four orchestral works collected in his Opus 47. However, Oistrakh’s performance is given piano accompaniment by Frida Bauer.

When I wrote my last article about this collection a little less than a week ago, I accused one of the CDs as having a “hodgepodge of encore pieces.” This Eastern European collection struck me as even more than a hodgepodge, even if it included five full-length concertos, one of which (the first concerto in E minor by Nikolai Rakov) definitely provided a journey of discovery. Fortunately, only one CD remains to complete the entire journey; and it should not be long before I provide my account of it!