JASCHA HEIFETZ: GODS FIDDLER A Film by Peter Rosen (Kultur DVD)
Its been a good few months for Jascha Heifetz fans. Sony has released a 103-CD collection certified by Guinness World Records as the largest box set ever devoted to a single classical player (affordably priced at less than $3 per disc). And Peter Rosen has made a feature-length documentary film, to be released on DVD this month, about the wunderkind of wunderkinds from Vilna who for many still represents the apex of violin perfection.
From the movies title alone, it sounds like a standard-issue classical music hagiography – but this film is more interesting than that. Of course, there are the requisite interviews with famous violinists searching for superlatives to describe the thrill of his playing, and old anecdotes are dusted off to bring color to the story of his phenomenal rise. But adding unusual visual interest, especially in the first third of the film, is Rosens extensive use of Heifetzs own home videos (he was a self-described camera fiend) and the shots lend a much more personal gloss than the typical assortment of archival footage.
Rosen also explores the chief complaint from Heifetz detractors: that his playing was cold. In strictly sonic terms that was rarely true, but as many have suggested, the misimpression was fueled by his exceedingly solemn and reserved stage demeanor. Even today its hard to watch footage of his hyper-detached performances without wondering about the seemingly vast distance between the notes and the mind behind them. Could great playing really involve – or even necessitate, if one buys the argument that his manner was a corrective to Romantic distortions – this state of temporary self-exile?
The film also suggests it may not have been so temporary. Heifetzs offstage personality, it turns out, was no less enigmatic even for those involved in his daily life. Rosen turns up plenty of former students, colleagues, and employees who speak with relative candor about his severity as a teacher, his obsessive need for privacy and formality (almost no one could use his first name, the classic Gershwin lyric notwithstanding), and more generally his stunted emotional growth. A couple of details give you the gist: He would summon his secretary into his studio every day with a bicycle horn, and, we are told, he wrote his three children out of his will.
Still, after the last century of music and politics mixing in unsavory ways, there cannot be many people left clinging to the notion that brilliant artists must also be noble human beings, and the film ultimately spends too long casting around for answers it cannot deliver about Heifetzs private demons. Near the end, Ayke Agus, who was his student and accompanist, suggests simply that Heifetz was opaque even to himself, except when he was playing his instrument. There the matter is left to lie.
The film would have been stronger with more extended footage of Heifetz performing in his prime. I also wished Rosen had pressed his coterie of violin talking heads to move beyond the expressions of rapture – he was an incredible machine who could do anything and everything on that fiddle! – to analyze the particular strengths and limitations of his playing from the inside out. The great violin pedagogue Carl Flesch, not mentioned here, was particularly good at precisely this kind of analysis. He lavished praise on Heifetzs phenomenal playing of the Sibelius Concerto, for instance, but also noted that his technique elsewhere could prove a double-edged sword, permitting him a kind of mental slumber. Playing without, in Fleschs choice phrase, inner participation could sometimes make for performances that were emotionally sterile despite their astonishing outward perfection.
Not surprisingly, Heifetz himself prized other qualities in a soloists execution. Near the end of the film, we hear his own revealing definition of violin mastery: the ability to make the violin a perfectly controlled instrument. On those terms, who could argue with the master?
BRUCKNER: SYMPHONY NO. 8 (1887 VERSION)
The fourth in Arthaus Musiks DVD series of Bruckner symphonies from Franz Welser-Mst and the Cleveland Orchestra offers an oddity (though you have to read the fine print to see what you are getting): the composers original 1887 Eighth, a version that most conductors, critics, and musicologists classify as a first draft rather than an example of first thought, best thought. Its handful of adherents on CD include Eliahu Inbal, Georg Tintner, and Simone Young; this is its initial video appearance.
As in his previous recordings of his countrymans work, Welser-Mst is respectful to a fault. He tightropes between precise and precious, grand and grandiloquent; the playing is (save for the oddly inaudible timpani) translucent, but its slow and soft-edged, and if you dont concentrate, it doesnt cohere. Welser-Mst is hyper-conscientious about dynamics; whats missing is an individual personality.
Whats missing from the DVD booklet is any explanation of why (for example) the loud, sprawling conclusion of the 1887 versions first movement is an improvement on the quieter, more compact revised ending we are used to. Welser-Mst has a better Bruckner sensibility than Inbal, a better orchestra than Tintner (whose tempos are similar), and, as he shows in the bonus pre-performance talk, a sense of humor. He points out that the Viennese love nicknames, and they called this symphony the Giant Snake because its really long and it goes on and on. The irony is, that could be a description of this performance. Welser-Mst fans will not be disappointed; if you are not among them, try the more dynamic Young. JEFFREY GANTZ
MEDITERRNEO Milos Karadaglic (Deutsche Grammophon)
Milos Karadaglic, the young Montenegran-born, London-resident guitarist, enters a field crowded with aging maestros (John Williams), middle-aged stars (Sharon Isbin, Elliot Fisk), and young talents to watch (Dale Kavanagh). With his debut album, Mediterrneo, he throws down the gauntlet, with Trregas Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Granadoss Andaluza, and Albnizs Asturias, Granada, and Sevilla – in other words, the much recorded and well-known Spanish guitar standards.
At 28, Karadaglic has enormous talent, a big heart, and a style that is not yet wholly individual. After listening to his Sevilla, or Andaluza, one turns to a Bream recording (on Ultimate Guitar, BMG) and is struck by his variety of color and accent, isolation of singing phrases (a slight vibrato now and then), and generally more forceful address. Karadaglic takes fewer risks, and does not give an equally sharp rhythmic definition to many of these pieces. On the other hand, he is as nimble as anyone in the Recuerdos, and the fast parts of the Asturias.
Karadaglic would have done well to program fewer pieces with heavy pedigrees, and more novelties to which our ears are not accustomed. The chief delight is Koyunbaba, a pan-Mediterranean fusion of Spanish, Italian, and Turkish elements by the wonderful Italian guitarist-composer Carlo Domeniconi. Karadaglic plays it as if no one had played it before. DAVID PERKINS
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