Repertoire: The BEST and WORST Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto

Summary

Dave Hurwitz from ClassicsToday.com shares a lively, distinctive, and funny critique of the best and the worst recordings of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. Describing 30 trillion recordings, he shares his humorous disdain for the most horrifying rendition, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Teodor Currentzis' interpretation, providing a hilarious mock lettered-review. Then, Hurwitz delves into his comprehensive and spirited recommendations of recordings by renowned violinists, providing insight into the fluidity of the piece and the artistry involved.

Highlights

• Dave Hurwitz humorously tears apart Kopatchinskaja's version, describing it as 'vulgar, random, and pretentious' 😆.
• He shares personal stories about how his cat reacted to double stops, adding a fun touch 🐱.
• Hilary Hahn's performance with Vasily Petrenko is highlighted for its exceptional artistry 🎻.
• Gil Shaham's blend of technical skill and soulful sound in collaboration with Sinopoli is appreciated 🎶.
• Dave encourages exploring personal taste and the different styles of violin music interpretation 🎧.

Key Takeaways

• Dave loves the original Tchaikovsky version, but controversies over cuts don't bother him 🤷‍♂️.
• Patricia Kopatchinskaja's rendition with Teodor Currentzis is hilariously roasted as the worst by Dave 😂.
• Choosing the right rendition is about balance: violinist and orchestra interpretation can vary significantly 🎻.
• Heifetz and Reiner offer a cool, technically perfect interpretation deserving of attention 🎼.
• Milstein's recording with Abbado is Dave's top pick, noted for its aristocratic polish and emotional richness 💎.

Overview

Dave Hurwitz opens the video with his amusing procrastination about tackling Tchaikovsky's much-recorded Violin Concerto and declares his preference for the original version. He humorously threatens no sanctimonious analysis about different interpretive cuts, and rather, he celebrates the flexibility of the piece—violinists' taste and style are at the forefront.

He dives into a delightful roast of the most disastrous rendition he's heard—it involves a sarcastic breakdown of Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Teodor Currentzis' version. His mock praise and a satirical congratulatory letter rides a line between amused astonishment and warning notes for listeners, marking the low in his review journey.

The video extends into an engaging celebration of exceptional performances by esteemed violinists. Dave highlights interpretations by legendary artists like Heifetz and Milstein, offering both technical excellence and deep emotional engagement. His animation mirrors the expressive freedom and taste inherent in the work, making a strong case for exploring this diverse repertoire.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto The chapter discusses Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, with Dave Hurwitz, the executive editor at ClassicsToday.com, addressing the best and worst recordings of this piece. He mentions that he's delayed discussing this topic due to the overwhelming number of recordings available, highlighting the challenges posed by the sheer volume of standard repertoire performances.
• 01:00 - 03:00: Discussion on Interpretive Flexibility and Taste The chapter explores the concept of interpretive flexibility and taste in music performance, particularly focusing on a concerto with several versions. It discusses how many violinists have interpreted the concerto differently, highlighting variations ranging from Tchaikovsky's original composition to modifications by Leopold Auer. Additionally, the chapter touches on the customary cuts or edits made by performers in different movements, emphasizing the personal touch that each musician brings to the piece.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Different Versions and Personal Preferences The speaker expresses a personal preference for hearing Tchaikovsky's compositions as originally written, appreciating the beauty of the music. They acknowledge that while some people choose to make cuts in the music and others don't, they don't feel inclined to make a big issue out of it. They emphasize a non-judgmental stance, suggesting that they simply like what they like regardless of whether the piece is altered or not.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Taste and Interpretation in Performances The chapter 'Taste and Interpretation in Performances' discusses the varying perspectives and criticisms surrounding artistic performances. It emphasizes that performances have inherent flexibility in terms of form and impact, allowing different interpretations and moral judgments. The speaker chooses not to engage in the moral discourse, acknowledging the diverse viewpoints on the matter.
• 07:00 - 12:00: Review of Patricia Kopachinskaya's Performance This chapter discusses a particular piece performed by Patricia Kopachinskaya, emphasizing the element of interpretive excess inherent to the performance. It notes that this excess brings up questions of taste, which are influenced by both the soloist's interpretation and the audience's preferences. The review hints at a wide range of performance styles that could impact one's appreciation, specifically mentioning 'hot and heavy slobbering romantic' as a performance style, suggesting that tastes can vary widely.
• 12:00 - 46:00: List of Recommended Performances This chapter discusses the subjective nature of appreciating performances, focusing on the aesthetic qualities and reputations surrounding famous figures in the performance industry. It mentions the example of an artist whose impact is both visually striking and deeply poetic, emphasizing elegance, proportion, and thoughtful consideration in their work.
• 46:00 - 46:30: Conclusion and Final Thoughts The final chapter reflects on the subjective nature of music and poetry appreciation. The speaker admits to having disliked a particular piece of music for a long time due to its heavy use of the violin and an abundance of sentimental elements or 'schmaltz.' However, they acknowledge that these characteristics are inherent to the piece and must be accepted. There is a recognition of the balance between heavy, emotional content and lighter, more traditionally appreciated poetry or music.

Repertoire: The BEST and WORST Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello friends this is dave hurwitz executive editor at classics today.com here with the best and one of the very worst recordings of tchaikovsky's violin concerto now this is a video that i have been procrastinating about for quite a while first of all there are 30 trillion recordings for this concerto and that's true of a lot of standard repertoire that repertoire let's call it what it is but
• 00:30 - 01:00 it's even worse with this concerto because first of all so many violins have made multiple versions of it and second of all it exists in multiple versions itself because there's what tchaikovsky actually wrote then there is the tweaked version by leopold hour and then there are the various cuts that you could make in the first movement in the finale well there's sort of one big one in the first movement and then there's a bunch of little ones in the finale but everyone does their thing
• 01:00 - 01:30 i i naturally i prefer to hear it the way tchaikovsky wrote it because he's a great composer and it's beautiful music and it's not a problem for me but if you think for one minute i'm going to jump up and down and make an issue about the fact that some people do cuts and some people don't do cuts and whether i like them or don't like them and have a whole sort of sanctimonious moral you know hysteria about it that ain't me i'm not going there i just like the ones i like and if it's cut if it's cut and if it isn't cut it's not cutting
• 01:30 - 02:00 more power to them so i will let the sanctimonious few point fingers and try and make the moral case one way or another i am not going to bother and but because because the piece i think has this sort of built-in shall we say flexibility as regards both form and the actual file in part it's kind of been taken for granted and
• 02:00 - 02:30 there's no question about it that the piece invites the kind of interpretive excess that really really brings in to the equation the issue of taste the taste of the soloist the taste of the listener taste and that's that's a whole another consideration as well because there are performances that run from the hot and heavy slobbering romantic vile
• 02:30 - 03:00 nauseating type most perhaps you know but in terms of famous names most graphically represented by the latest um on a sophie muter which is just that's one of the worst but that's not the one i'm talking about and and you know two extremely elegant and and beautifully proportioned and and finely considered and and something that turns it into a piece of true poetry
• 03:00 - 03:30 i mean we all i think prefer the poetry but sometimes poetry is hot and heavy and it's no worse for that and so we like a little of that too i mean the piece has a lot of built-in schmaltz and the schmaltz is just part of the music and you have to just deal with it i really disliked this piece for a very very long time i really did i i i couldn't quite wrap my brain around it because it just for me had too much violin i mean i was just waiting for the violin
• 03:30 - 04:00 to stop and for the orchestra to do something i mean in the first movement you know it gets going in it when that big tutti the pollinate rhythm you know you know the underneath i was like jeez i thought we'd never get there oh thank god finally because tchaikovsky does keep you waiting and then has an awful lot of fiddling
• 04:00 - 04:30 going on and what's more i never liked double stops you know double stop is when you play the violin you know the violin can play two even three notes more or less at the same time what you do is you stop the strings appropriately or you leave one open and stop one or you do whatever and then you take your bow and you whack both strings because you have to get the right angle and goes like this i think i think double stops sound like you're torturing a cat and i have a cat
• 04:30 - 05:00 and i know what it sounds like so trust me and the last time i played something with a lot of double stops my cat answered it so she knew what it was too i'm serious i just think most of the time they sound ugly and out of tune and quite often they do sound ugly and out of tune you've got to get a player who knows how to play double stops beautifully in tune and there aren't many of them and when you have tons and tons and tons of double stops as you do in this concerto you have many many many many
• 05:00 - 05:30 opportunities to make ugly and out of tune sounds and it just does just ground the grinding scratchy sounds another thing of the violin part always put me off gradually i came to understand it and listen and i heard great performances which of course sold me on the piece so i very particular generally speaking about the performances that i enjoy and i really get my backup when people monkey with it too much because like i
• 05:30 - 06:00 said the the monkey business is is is all in there you don't have to do that much with it to make a a very very beautiful respectable interpretation now of course genius is a whole nother question right i mean you know you there are people who can and we will be talking about them who can do amazing things with the text and with the shape of the text and with tempo and rubato and all that kind of cool stuff so so there are wonderful wonderful performances of those pieces i have
• 06:00 - 06:30 selected um 16 or 17 of them and we've already talked about one that i dislike so that doesn't count the ones i don't like but i do want to talk about possibly the most horrible performance of the tchaikovsky violin concerto that i've heard in like a billion zillion years it is really atrociously bad and i'm even going to read the review that i wrote of it which is you know password protected at classicstoday.com because it's so special
• 06:30 - 07:00 but what the heck you know i don't care it's this one it's this one with with patricia kopachinskaya and and muzuke tarana under theodore corrensis now now it's coupled with stravinsky's like nos so the whole the you know the wedding so the whole thing here is is wedding based i mean if you look at the look at the cover here it's sort of like some grotesque
• 07:00 - 07:30 russian peasant version of the last supper which is supposed to introduce the spiritual element look at this again i mean isn't that just isn't that just horrifying so that's karensis and kopechinskaya and and this is a very wonderful representation of what they actually do to the music which is basically you know crap all over it dodayistically but we're going to get to that i want to share with you the review of this horror show that i wrote i mean
• 07:30 - 08:00 there's just it's just so vulgar it's random and it's vulgar and it's pretentious and it's desperate to do something different and desperate to prove that it's a great work of music and no one realized it until they got their claws on it you know that's that's what it was oh my god it's just terrifying i mean i just i just hope that the caterer pushed them into the cake anyway here is my my review which
• 08:00 - 08:30 is in the form of a letter because this is of course their wedding i mean it's the wedding thing so i thought that i should write them a fabulous little letter congratulating them on their their wedding i mean it's not they're not really married don't worry so here we are dear patricia and teo i was so deeply moved by the charming letters that you wrote to each other and which comprise the booklet notes of your new performance of tchaikovsky's violin
• 08:30 - 09:00 concerto yeah that's how they did it that i felt compelled to respond in kind i was particularly struck patricia by the rhetorical gusto with which you asked these questions quote what is it that music does to us unquote what indeed i wondered while listening what does it mean to open our souls to sorrow on this scale to yield ourselves prostrate before the infinite to forget
• 09:00 - 09:30 who we are musicians perhaps on evidence here nah no quote to turn into a new to turn into a raw nerve of vulnerability raw is truly the word for your playing my dear it's definitely raw and teo surely you are wise to point out that quote it is impossible to descend the chromatic scales of nostalgia with lies unquote
• 09:30 - 10:00 everyone knows that one can only descend the diatonic scales of nostalgia with lies such depth such insight it is so clear to me that the music making offered here comes from the very bowels of your beings i suspect however that the bowels that you had in mind and the ones that i believe characterize the performance might not be the same certainly the two of you achieved your goal which is to be different at all costs any costs
• 10:00 - 10:30 how well i understand patricia that this is what you meant when you say quote for a long time the tchaikovsky concerto was alien to me to my years it didn't have any music relevant to our own time moronic violinism that's what i thought of it unquote how perfectly this characterizes your own performance what else explains the fact that tchaikovsky marks the solo part of the canzanetta
• 10:30 - 11:00 espressivo and you play it with the most glacial wisp of tone possible utterly devoid of expression why should we take literally tchaikovsky's naive suggestion that a piece called a kansonetta requires a warm cantabile melodic line like a song why else would you impose such a wealth of interpretive graffiti on the simple solo cadenza before the finale which otherwise flies by at a pace that defies any possible subtlety of
• 11:00 - 11:30 characterization moronic violinism indeed i would think i would think of other adjectives as well narcissistic unmusical charmless and all of it underpinned teo by the usual micromanaged vivisection of the orchestral accompaniment that passes in your hands for interpretation but why bother indeed i can't help but wonder why you both feel it necessary to play
• 11:30 - 12:00 even the notes that tchaikovsky himself wrote clearly they hold little interest other than as a blank slate on which to scribble whatever random foolishness happens to come into your minds or rather bowels please excuse my pedantry then if i insist on the distinction between artistry which involves the ability to project your own personality from within the idiomatic style of the work and the affectations of a couple of well-trained posers that said the black and white photos
• 12:00 - 12:30 that adorned the cover in the booklet with the two of you impersonating bride and groom do put a rather creepy gloss on the whole production i can't help but notice how the artificiality and pretension of the little game of dress up that you evidently enjoyed playing finds such a precise analog and the very sounds that you produce here's the the piester resistance look at that oh isn't that romantic aren't they the
• 12:30 - 13:00 charming couple look at that i mean it looks like some sort of like horror movie or something i don't know yup okay anyway and so dear friends i leave you with the sincere hope that in conceiving this production you have had a good laugh at the public's expense and are enjoying your private joke it was a good one you have created a party record that i will not soon forget the alternative namely that the two of you are serious is too depressing to
• 13:00 - 13:30 contemplate with best wishes dave so there you are possibly the most horrible certainly the most horrible modern recording of the tchaikovsky violin concerto by two complete narcissistic musical whatever you want to call them you you make it up all right let's talk about the good ones shall we let's get rid of that oh i'll throw it good enough there you go piece of junk let's talk about the better ones of which there are no shortage so i'm going to start
• 13:30 - 14:00 actually with a historical one normally i don't get into historical recordings as you know because there are just so many fabulous modern ones and i believe for people who know the work really well you already know what the discography is you know what the historical ones are and so i don't really need to go there but for people who are uh who don't know it well who only may have one recording and are looking for an alternative or who are just getting familiar with it you've got to hear the music so that means you've got to hear the whole thing so you know yes there's bronislav
• 14:00 - 14:30 huberman and all those other people they're wonderful we love them and that's that next um the furthest back that i think i'm gonna go is what's this 1952 yes 1952 this is a fantastic performance erica mourini who was a marvelous violinist and it's with ference freechoi i mean conducting with the berlin rais orchestra i mean what could be bad we all know that free troy was amazing in tchaikovsky as an accompanist and and
• 14:30 - 15:00 mourinho just just smokes in this performance it's just a blazing performance with other um short works attached to it and it's on audita and it's absolutely wonderful so if you're interested in historical recordings or older recordings you might want to start here it's in good sound you can hear everything and the playing is just dynamite so yes to mourinho next well a lot of you sort of you know get annoyed with me when i do these violent
• 15:00 - 15:30 things because i haven't spent much time talking about heinrich sharing and i'm sorry about that because he was a wonderful wonderful violinist i have the big sharing box up there there's tons of stuff i mean he did lots and lots of recordings and he was marvelous he really was but there's just so much good stuff and somehow you know i just didn't get to him the way i the way i probably ought to i think one of the reasons is because it isn't a big box that i have buried over there are the big boxes and you know
• 15:30 - 16:00 when you have singleton recordings i can look under the t's for tchaikovsky and pull out the cds and we're under s for sibelius or b for brahms or whatever the tchaikovsky is coupled with and i can find a whole pile of individual cds but but with sharing it's all in the box so i have to go and get the box i'm just too lazy sometimes it's my fault so i apologize to all the sharing fans because he's he's wonderful i mean he really is wonderful and he is wonderful in this recording with
• 16:00 - 16:30 charlemagne the boston symphony it's definitely a fabulous tchaikovsky violin concerto and you know there you go there's your heinrich sharing it's a big bold gutsy romantic passionate but not grotesque performance of the concerto it really is beautiful and and i love listening to it it's in this this is the munch late romantic masterpieces box at least at least that that winnows the size of the box down a little bit you know what i
• 16:30 - 17:00 mean i mean i actually have it on a single disc too and it's in the munch edition but i'm not and there's this in the big munch box but i'm not worried about that i just want you to know that sharing is out there and he's terrific and if you like him help yourself um you know there i think he did it a couple times too actually he's one of mercury too isn't there i don't know it's just so much stuff so much stuff but with munch i think you're in really good shape next oh yeah hilary hahn
• 17:00 - 17:30 you have to talk about hillary hunt she is one of the great violinists out there today and what's nice about this performance is that as as usual with her recordings she likes to couple intriguing pieces together it's like she did sibelius and schoenberg and she did some you know beethoven and bernstein and now she has the tchaikovsky violin concerto and jennifer higdon's violin concerto which is a lovely contemporary work and so this is wonderful to have and it's with the royal liverpool phil
• 17:30 - 18:00 and vasily patrenco who was a wonderful conductor as you know from his nexus shostakovich series and you know it from here she accompanies beautifully and this is a fun coupling i like it when you have two nicely complementary works on the disc sometimes these cufflinks can go terribly wrong because the two pieces have nothing to do with each other it's like terrifying i remember who was it alicia weilerstein or whatever the cellist who did something like elgar elliott carter or something like that
• 18:00 - 18:30 was that was not a great idea excuse me it really wasn't because no one who wants one is really going to want the other the two of them don't have any points of contact i mean even sibelius and schoenberg have something but but that didn't so so these do though because higdon is a contemporary composer who writes in that what you might call a neo-romantic vein and she's a tremendously gifted and colorful composer and this is lovely
• 18:30 - 19:00 so hillary han tchaikovsky and higdon it's a wonderful disc it really is okay yeah we got to do this one see these are all boxes boxes gilshah gil shahan you know this is such a great box of stuff he was such a gifted violinist and i think in a way it was his misfortune that when he was initially making recordings for deutsche gramophone there were just so many of them out there so many people out there so many violinists so many people doing all doing the same stuff and so i don't
• 19:00 - 19:30 think he got quite as much attention even though he was on deutsche gramophone and he was being very vigorously promoted by at least by the new york wing of universal by deutsche gramophone here in new york but then they just unceremoniously dropped him and now he has his own label canary classics where he gets to do all the stuff that's on here all over again but this is a beautiful beautiful beautiful performance um i have to actually take a look and tell you who it's with because i wasn't even looking at it i
• 19:30 - 20:00 just i just know that i love the performance i don't even pay attention hang on oh there's the barber corn gold oh what a great disc that was oh that was wonderful and then we have mandelson and devorjak which is lovely and then we have this and that up tchaikovsky.chaikowski we have to get the other tchaikovsky uh here's the tchaikovsky violin concerto don't tell me it isn't in here and that i'm just hallucinating which i you know it's always a possibility where did it go up there it is yes the
• 20:00 - 20:30 philharmonia was synopoly coupled with sibelius which some of you mentioned when i did the sibelius thing it's a very good sibelius a wonderful tchaikovsky gorgeously recorded sinopoly is a fun conductor for that stuff because he's into late romantic decadent schlock and that kind of stuff so but shaham is is a class act all the way through soup to nuts and sinopoly provides a very warm and cozy environment in which he can operate and display his violinistic skills so gil
• 20:30 - 21:00 johamen sinopoli is a lot of fun yes it's just a lot of fun now let's talk about some people who did you know the famous ones who did some multiple versions we're going to do like a few of those but the first one here obviously that we need to talk about is pearlman pearlman really for maybe five or ten years and like the eighties kind of owned the tchaikovsky concerto it was it
• 21:00 - 21:30 was it was his uh see it was a signature a signature piece of his he didn't really own it because milstein owned it well we're going to get to him but this is his first one with leinsdorf and it's i like i like his line store stuff the best i think it was there's a certain freshness and and vivacity that he didn't quite always match in his remakes of which i think there are at least two i again i haven't even looked i haven't even looked because once you get the name you get the name and you
• 21:30 - 22:00 know what he's going to do and perlman is the was the epitome of the the yummy romantic warm lush big tone really the the the successor or the inheritor of the the russian school that russian tradition and he's wonderful at it he's absolutely wonderful at it's fantastic stuff so i i just think his tchaikovsky could charity all of them are very very beautiful but i like these earlier rca
• 22:00 - 22:30 ones because you know when his emi stuff came along he wanted the microphone right in the violin and he said he was very honest about it he said they want to hear me they don't care about the orchestra that is also sort of the the attitude of the great violin virtuosi of of the of the past especially back in the days when they really couldn't capture the orchestra so it didn't matter all that mattered was the violin and you know pronoun is not quite that bad he's not but he's very very front and center and thank god he
• 22:30 - 23:00 withstands the scrutiny he really does i mean he's quite something in this piece and so i i go with perlman in line store if you're in great shape with it on rca and if you want to get one of the later ones be my guest they're beautiful you can't go wrong absolutely can't go wrong well another duplicate guy was isaac stern he did it with ormondy which is here in this ormond d tchaikovsky box and he did it with bernstein which i always thought
• 23:00 - 23:30 was kind of fascinating because they were rather rather close together in time actually but you know i mean they're both wonderful they really are i mean ormondy was a great tchaikovsky conductor bird's night was a great tchaikovsky conductor but they were quite different you know bernstein is a little bit more um shall we say interventionist than ormond he was particularly as a concerto accompanist stern is great in both of them he's also another one of those guys who is you know heir to that wonderful romantic tradition of violin playing he
• 23:30 - 24:00 is roundly castigated by certain people in certain circles for not being as good as fill in the blank of violinist x yes he is stern is a tremendous violinist he was a very very gifted interpreter of this music he plays it with as if to the matter born and it's up to you which one you want you can pick and choose and make yourself happy they're really quite similar actually although like i said
• 24:00 - 24:30 the accompaniments are different and so that's that's kind of an interesting thing but stern is stern um he doesn't radically revise his view of the work i don't think i just think he sounds beautiful and it's a very they're very affecting performances so stern is terrific also oyster now oyster rock we've got two of them here and of course they're melodio ones too so we're not you know you can have hundreds of tchaikovsky
• 24:30 - 25:00 violent controls all with the same people which is just humongous i think sort of like waste of time but you know that's me with normandy gorgeous i mean what do you expect it's gorgeous fabulous just like with isaac's turn it's gorgeous and fabulous this is that discord alto some of you mentioned that has the sibelius concerto and uh you know it's a good transfer it sounds okay i mean it's not first class sound but it's good enough
• 25:00 - 25:30 for sure and this one is mono but this is with conviction in the stats capella dresden which i think is awfully interesting and it's very good mono and and this voice truck is in is in really wonderful form you know and this is also in the early 50s in that area mid 50s just before the stereo era and he plays wonderfully it is really great to hear convictiony and then and the stats capella dresden doing that music from that period it really is fun and so
• 25:30 - 26:00 i i i don't know which one to pick you you take your choice they're both great they both have very distinctive accompanists in this case they sound quite different the accompanist anyway and and uh oyster zoystrak he was one of the greats so that's that pile of them pair of them that's a good way if they do more than one i can save some time and do multiple performances at once instead of having to do them one e at a
• 26:00 - 26:30 time oh yeah because we've got more of those coming too oh yeah so now we have some interesting ones coming up i think that you will find extremely interesting another violinist you guys beat me up for not mentioning frequently enough is leonard cogan who is fantastic as well he does a great beethoven concerto and he does a great coffee of second concerns on this disc this is on testament and the tchaikovsky violin concerto um which is
• 26:30 - 27:00 let's see it's with oh yeah the paris conservatory orchestra under constantine silvestri now it's with andre van der neut which is just as good in my view of andrew and it was a fine conductor and of course the paris conservatoire is the paris conservatoire it's absolutely wonderful so this is fun to listen to and kogan is great he's the russian school you know the russian school and tchaikovsky was
• 27:00 - 27:30 russian so russians do russian music generally pretty well and kogan of course was one of the greats and he was a little bit dwarfed by oyster rock and so a lot i think of the boosterism behind kogan has to do with you know sort of rooting for the underdog you know if there were other russian besides oyster and kogan was one of them just as there were other russian pianists besides richter which is kind of the impetus behind the gillel's lobby
• 27:30 - 28:00 you know they they were pushing him because everybody was talking about richter all the time so kogan gets a little bit of that kind of like you know underdog promotion but heaven heavens he deserves it he's a wonderful wonderful artist with a another beautiful rich tone and and it's a lovely performance and it's fun to hear the paris conservatory orchestra as the accompanist and that brings up actually another issue he put it there and the issue is this you know the tchaikovsky concerto is so
• 28:00 - 28:30 violinistically heavy that you can really get away with it um if the orchestra is pretty mediocre and you don't hear it all that well the accompaniment's kind of slovenly i mean you can because the violin is just so front and center the whole time it's not like the sibelius where even though it's a a mendelson style concerto form which has the soloist coming in right away and the orchestra is not going to be independently defined
• 28:30 - 29:00 for any length of time it it's still it it has a very different kind of balance between the solo and the accompaniment so you can get away with that you can get away with having the soloist always front and center in the performance in the and the accompanist sort of along for the ride the orchestra and the conductor just keep up but if you don't if you do have a conductor who has a personality and who wants to bring
• 29:00 - 29:30 something to the table it works equally well that way too and there are countless felicities and subtleties of orchestration that tchaikovsky reveals which are wonderful if you get to hear them behind the violin you know one of one of them is one of them is just in the finale you know the violence going up if you listen carefully when like the second time it comes around behind that there are these wonderful wind cords
• 29:30 - 30:00 delicious little repeated chords in the winds you know the violence going chugga chugga chugga chug and the winds and if you can balance that oh my what a wonderful sound it makes just what a delightfully enchanting sonority and there are a lot of moments like that in this concerto they really are but it all depends on whether the soloist lets the conductor get away with it or the conductor imposes himself on the work enough and
• 30:00 - 30:30 you know and you can do it either way and it's one of the things actually that makes performances of this piece so much you know so much fun to compare because there are so many little details that you can hear in some performances but not in others and it's also why historical recordings of the piece tended to work because when all you could hear was the violin part it still worked i mean you wanted to hear more orchestra but you know if you couldn't it was okay because the violin wasn't stopping it was going to be hacking away no matter what so that's something to keep in mind when you're
• 30:30 - 31:00 listening to these performances whether you really want to hear the orchestra or whether you only care about the soloist and neither way is right you know the piece the piece is is it's like most pieces of music it's very hardy and it sustains multiple visions of how it should be played one vision that i really think most of you probably haven't heard but you really should is this one on super fun with pavel sporchel who's a wonderful violinist my goodness
• 31:00 - 31:30 a young czech violinist plays the bejesus out of it and it's absolutely fantastic you've got the dvorak and the tchaikovsky and you've got vladimir ashkenazi and yurji bilathrava conducting and what makes this even more fun is that ashkenazi is conducting the dvorak and piochlavic has conducted the tchaikovsky it's just the opposite of the way you think it would normally go but they're both spectacular and sportul is just great he's real or i should say sportal
• 31:30 - 32:00 that's how you pronounce it he's a sporchel he's really really really good young fresh vivacious dynamic soulful in the canzanetta he really really milks the piece in the best possible way it's a beautiful performance that will all too easily be overlooked simply because he's not a big name here in the west and because super fun recordings don't get that kind of attention but this is a class act all the way through for both the dvorak
• 32:00 - 32:30 and the tchaikovsky and it's an interesting coupling because you usually don't hear these two works together but they are you know roughly contemporaneous and they both had equal birthing pains you know dvorak wrote it for joachim who never played it and told dvorak to revise it 150 times and dvorak refused and the tchaikovsky was supposed to be dedicated to our and our did the same thing with tchaikovsky and tortured him over it yeah it's very interesting very very interesting they were both written at the time when these the composer was
• 32:30 - 33:00 not quite the king of the hill when faced with the demands of a big name soloist but the composers won at the end of the day and here they are sportul very very good on super fun with ashkenazi and bill clavic and of course we have to talk about heifetz who recorded it multiple times in the 78 era but this is his stereo recording with fritz reiner and chicago
• 33:00 - 33:30 yeah they also did the proms we talked about that total hotness well this tchaikovsky is just to be you know tie fits that's what i keep saying whenever we come up with high fits it's like high fence what are you going to do hi fence tie fits it is of a technical polish and scrupulosity that is really outrageous absolutely outstanding and exciting and for those
• 33:30 - 34:00 of you who would prefer what they call a cooler interpretation i think that heifetz is perfect i actually i actually have a little something to tell you about this hot and cold business that i think is very interesting it's an acoustical phenomenon you know one of the things that i pointed out my various writings about you know tragedy or music that's tragic is that tragedy and misery are easy emotion is easy expressivity is easy
• 34:00 - 34:30 because in music it's just a function of time i mean if you want to do sad music you all you have to do is is jump into a minor key and sit there and the longer you hang out the sadder the music gets because it's merely a function of of the same mood over time sadness is a function of sameness happiness humor god forbid is not that is a function of contrast and change and that's why humor and
• 34:30 - 35:00 happiness is vastly more difficult to achieve musically than sadness and i also think this applies to some of the way people feel about heifetz heifetz is not less expressive or less passionate than anyone else out there he just gives the impression of being cooler because he lingers less that's what happens and that means that the passion the expression that height that high tank that highfits i think expresses comes through different means
• 35:00 - 35:30 there has to be a way to do it without sitting there on your on your minor key or whatever note or whatever passage and noodling with it cause hyphens was not a noodler he does it through the intensity of his vibrato through the pressure of the the bow on the string he does it with phrasing and accent but these are all much more um subjective qualities they're much harder to pin down especially on a casual listen than somebody who simply you know sits
• 35:30 - 36:00 on a phrase and milks it for all it's worth and so that's why hyphens i think gets this sort of reputation for being a little bit on the cool side but i don't hear it i don't think it's true i really think that they're just different different ways to the same ends and heifetz had his and part of his was just the superb technical perfection that was characteristic of everything that he did and there's nothing wrong
• 36:00 - 36:30 with that so yeah heifetz and reiner they're a big deal in the tchaikovsky violin concerto also now here's one some of you might not have heard and it's it's a historical recording it's from 19 i think 52 or 54 somewhere in there but this is just one of the great tchaikovsky concerti and with one of the great violinists of the 20th century is not at all well known and that's ivory getless you know gitless he died in 2020 he was 98 living in
• 36:30 - 37:00 paris he's you know he was a legend among violinists because here's a guy here's a guy who was so individual he was so personal he people held him in awe you never knew what you were going to get with him and i don't mean that in a bad way i don't mean that in the fort vanglerion way which means you know it all went to hell or you know it could be amazing no killers was usually amazing but in wildly different ways he said he said once one of his quotes
• 37:00 - 37:30 was that rubato is the rubato is the art of playing in tempo and that is so much a truth about his own style he had a freedom and flexibility of phrasing that was unlike anybody else in the business and i want to play you a little bit just so you get a sense of it i think he was one of the great masters at making the violin speak it's sounding as though he were saying something to you individually every time
• 37:30 - 38:00 you listen to him so i want you to hear the opening of the finale in this performance this is with the vienna symphony under heinrich holris it's not one for which you're going to choose the orchestra as an equal participant but they're not bad they're okay and the point is the point is that just listen to the way he phrases it and then the way he somehow just takes off like a shot and you know in the finale the orchestra is sort of hanging
• 38:00 - 38:30 on for dear life trying to catch up they do that with mourinho too and they actually don't catch up at one point but here they managed to stay with him for the most part but my god how expressive this is expressive but also disciplined it's really an amazing combination and i don't think you hear it quite the same way with any other violinist i really don't so let me give you a little bit of the finale with featuring every kidless in the tchaikovsky violin concerto this is really special listen to that violin
• 38:30 - 39:00 speak [Music] um
• 39:00 - 39:30 [Music] ah [Music] [Laughter] [Music]
• 39:30 - 40:00 be
• 40:00 - 40:30 [Music]
• 40:30 - 41:00 amazing isn't it i mean did you hear it
• 41:00 - 41:30 i hope you did i hope you have other versions that you can compare this to um this is a vox recording it's not expensive by the way it's still around um and you get the tchaikovsky the brook the sibelius the mendelssohn and the bartok second violin concerto and sonata for solo violin all on two cds that's a pretty good deal so i think this is you know one of those essential violin collection discs even if the sound is a little bit you know mono who
• 41:30 - 42:00 cares this is violin playing of the very very highest quality and getlist did not make a lot of recordings he was he was best known for doing a lot of contemporary music and he had tons of stuff dedicated to him because his technique and his sound was just so extraordinary he hypnotized people and you can hear why in this performance of the tchaikovsky so i think gitless is something that everybody should hear i really do next well we already have spoken about her previously
• 42:00 - 42:30 mulliva because we just did a sibelius repertoire video and here she was and here's the disc and i told you it would be back for the tchaikovsky because these are two equally superb performances this is with azawa in boston she has this wonderful rich dusky tone the sibelius is fabulously atmospheric and dark and i think the same qualities that same sort of brooding melancholy if you want to call it that gives the tchaikovsky an
• 42:30 - 43:00 extra element of intensity and also also polish because her technique is very very polished and she does not she does not ooze all over the music not at all she has a sternness and a steeliness to her which i think is just so powerful and it's so powerful with this music because the tchaikovsky as you know i mean it can it can disintegrate into just you know a puddle and and mulva is never into the puddle she
• 43:00 - 43:30 does not step into the puddle she does not melt into a puddle she's not a puddle lady she is a very strong powerful violinistic personality and it comes through in every note of this performance so yes malava we have to talk about however however oh boy we have to make a pick don't we and that pic like i said the other person who owned this piece aside from
• 43:30 - 44:00 perlman slightly after milstein retired was milstein and milstein recorded it at least three or four times there's also aside from these two this is the the emi one the warner one there's this one and then there was there's a cheryl munch mono one which is quite fine also with boston and then there's this one which is my pick it's the stereo last one he did with claudio lubato and and the vienna philharmonic and it's just you know it's the it's the end of a life
• 44:00 - 44:30 of impeccable unbelievably noble and and rich and tasteful and and just beautiful violin playing i mean milstein was the guy he i saw him play this like three or four times i don't know how he did it so many times he was so well known for doing the tchaikovsky and he was superb he was just superb he had a an aristocratic polish in the music
• 44:30 - 45:00 that just elevated the whole thing it really did and at the same time i mean he was another our pupil like heifetz was i mean he was as expressive and as warm and humane and and emotionally intense as anybody out there but you he was kind of like he was kind of like the claudio arau of violinists if you want to put it that way he just had this beautiful tone and he everything that he touched turned to
• 45:00 - 45:30 gold it really did he was just extraordinary that way and so i think milstein in a bottle is a great way to sort of get yourself going with the tchaikovsky violin concerto collection assuming you're going to own hundreds of them at some point this is coupled with the mendelssohn which is equally fine and uh it's one of the great violin records out there really is this is on penguin classics um but you know it's still still around probably i mean there's a little a little
• 45:30 - 46:00 set of all the milstein recordings um and they're they're absolutely magnificent you should have them all i mean because you get the you get the the brahms with joachim and you get the box and others and partitas i mean it's just it's a great a great little little set it's just like four discs i think three or four discs you get this so i think that milstein and tchaikovsky has to be acknowledged as one of the great happenings in the violin concerto world in the second half of the 20th century
• 46:00 - 46:30 and that my friends is all i have to say about the tchaikovsky violin concerto i hope this has given you some food for thought and more than enough information so that you can go out there and get yourself a performance that really suits you keep on listening my friends thank you so much for joining me take care