Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Heifetz - Violin Greatest Hits
The notion of a "violin greatest hits" disc is somewhat difficult for me to get my mind around. That one violinist is sufficient for such a disc is easier for me to comprehend, as long as the violinist is Jascha Heifetz. As a not particularly talented violin student, I did not have to be catechized that for the violin there is one god and that his name was Jascha Heifetz. It was obvious to me that I would never be able to do what he did with seeming effortlessness, that I was more likely to migrate to Mars than to fiddle like Heifetz. (And no one has yet done either one of those.)
No one knows what Paganini really sounded like, though it is certain that he did not have Heifetz's vibrato (because broad vibrato was only introduced early in the 20th century by Fritz Kreisler). The dexterity which seemed to a young violinist as I was once as inhuman made it possible for Heifetz to rip through pieces at a faster tempo than anyone, but he also made his Stradivarius sing, and not just in slow movements. Some listeners found the sloppier intonation of Kreisler and Isaac Stern "warmer" I heard far too many sour notes and wrong notes from Stern ever to have considered him a great violinist; Yehudi Menuhin may once have been one, but was not by the time I first heard him in 1970; the only other one then was another Russian Jewish émigré, Nathan Milstein; now there are two: Maxim Vengerov and Anna-Sophie Mutter).
The selections on the disk include one movement each from four the four nineteenth-century consensus great violin concerti—the Beethoven (the Rondo), the Mendelsohn (the finale), the Brahms (the Adagio), and the Tchaikowsky (the opening movement, Allegro moderato)—plus the first movement (Vivace) of the Bach two-violin concerto (the only one I ever played; Heifetz recorded it with Erik Friedman, an excellent violinist who did not succeed to the throne). I have the full recordings of all of these. The Brahms shows how Heifetz could make the violin sing (as, to a lesser extent, does the Mendelsohn). The contrast of the flamboyance of what Tchaikowsky wrote with the restraint of what Beethoven wrote is interesting. Most violinists play the Beethoven like the Tchaikowsky, but Heifetz played a more classical (that is, less romantic, and not at all late romantic) concerto (albeit with modern vibrato, as also the Bach double concerto).
Those four concerti are the violin's greatest hits in the most-played and most-beloved sense. I regret that the compilation did not include the incredible vituoso playing of the Sibelius concerto, a piece which Heifetz made part of the standard violin/orchestra repertoire and the very beautiful playing of the Prokofiev second violin concerto (which bewitched me as a preadolescent). (There are also the Max Bruch pieces that Heifetz championed.)
The disc also includes recordings of French showcase pieces for violin and orchestra: the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso of Camille Saint-Saëns, the Symphone Espagnole of Edouard Lalo, and the suite ("Fantasy") from Georges Bizet's "Carmen" arranged by Franz Waxman. Heifetz played them all beautifully, and somewhat faster than most other violinists do (because he could?).
Even more crowd-pleasing bon-bons are a brief rendition of "Summertime" from George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," "The Flight of the Bumblebee" from Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Tsar Sultan," and the Hora Staccato arranged by Heifetz from music composed by Grigorias Dincu. All three of these have piano accompaniment. The latter two were frequent encore choices showing off virtuosic violin technique. From the recordings I had as a preschooler, the only one I remember is "The Flight of the Bumblebee." I was fascinated by it and played it over and over, before the thought of trying to play a violin occurred to me.
Another sometimes encore and Heifetz signature piece was the dauntingly difficult third partita for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1006). The third solo violin partitas is the Mount Everest of totally exposed violin playing, though Heifetz climbed it as easily as others ski down a moderately difficult slope. To truly appreciate how good he was in this may not be obvious to a nonviolinist who has never looked at the music. (That something phenomenal is going on is more obvious in The Flight of the Bumblebee" and Hora Staccato). The rest of the selections can more easily be appreciated as listening experiences by anyone who appreciates beautiful sounds. There is no sloppy sentimentality, but even taken from early 1950s recordings the sound is not dry. I might say it is "Olympian," but have already placed Heifetz on higher summits. If not a god, as I supposed as a child, he was godlike a violin player. This disc (with recordings from 1946-1965, with most in the early 1950s) provides a sampler, though neglecting his recordings of 20th-century violin masterpieces (or the Vitali Chaconne...).
It is also an introduction to the 45-disc Heifetz Collection or to recordings of the full concerti from which movements have been culled. I want the whole pieces, but I already have them.
I can't figure out the basis of ordering of the tracks on the CD. It is not chronological either in order of composition or order of recording (starting with Tchaikovsky, ending with Mendelsohn with the Bach selections third and tenth out of the twelve tracks, Bizet/Waxman, Gershwin, and Lalo between Brahms and Beethoven...).
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