Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 2. Jascha Heifetz, Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky. AS Disc AS 568 Sergei Koussevitzky Edition (1990) no barcode
Recorded 2 September 1950 (Beeethoven), 1 April 1949 (Prokofiev)
The most radical performance of Beethoven’s Concerto ever committed to disc
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 10 and 11 August 2014, amended for repost 29 September 2024
AS Disc’s Sergei Koussevitzky Edition (which went from AS 550 to AS 574), released in the early 1990s, was a valuable series, making available many Koussevitzky live performances that could not be found elsewhere – a situation compounded by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s policy, in those early years of the CD, of cracking down on all “unofficial” releases of the orchestra’s performances, under the pretext that they would, eventually, release them in much better sonic and editorial renditions (spoiler: outside of the invaluable 2001 Boston Symphony Orchestra Centennial Celebration, they didn’t – link will open new tab to lising on Discogs). Not only was AS Disc’s Koussevitzky series barred from US distribution, but Music & Arts’ early releases of performances by Pierre Monteux (CD-269, CD-312), Charles Munch (CD-236 (2), CD-277, CD-278) and John Barbirolli (CD 251 (2)) were also the deplorable victims of that policy, and lucky those (as myself) who were quick enough to buy those CDs before they were retired (for more on the controversy, see my review of James H. North’s invaluable Discography of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Scarecrow Press, 2009).
Other than being barred from US distribution back then, AS Disc – an Italian bootleg label – didn’t use barcodes in those years, and consequently the CDs are rarely listed on the big bureaucratic Orwellian online retailer where I used to post my reviews when it was more amicable to a spirit of community (as opposed to “profits only”). When I originally wrote this review, a decade ago, I posted the 
Beethoven part under another edition of the Beethoven Concerto (on Doremi’s Jascha Heifetz Collection vol. 4, DHR-7725, barcode 723723416223), with a much less attractive pairing of Heifetzian tidbits, and likewise with the Prokofiev Concerto, under Cembal d’Amour’s 
edition, “Jascha Heifetz Live, Vol. 2”, CD 115, barcode 798167357920 (with the more substantial pairing of Tchaikovky’s Concerto).
Not that this performance of Beethoven’s Concerto was concerned by the BSO’s policy, since it is the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, not Boston (but the Prokofiev IS Boston), and sure enough, you can hear the crickets at a distance. In Beethoven, AS Disc sonics are okay, and in fact surprisingly good considering the source, the type of document, and what we’ve become used to from Italian bootleg labels. There are a couple of minuscule dropouts early on, the orchestra is a bit harsh and boxy, but present, and the violin registers vividly. At 16:08 in the first movement, in a bar of silence between two orchestral outbursts in the tutti just before the cadenza, there is a perceptible edit, with a change of sonic perspective and the orchestra suddenly sounding closer, as if there had been a change of acetate disc at that point, and at 17:15, during the solo cadenza, the perspective changes again, with the disappearance of a background noise that sounded less like surface noise than an electronic buzz or the sound of some kind of blower or maybe the motor of a turntable, and the reappearance of the crickets. I tried to check if AS Disc hadn’t substituted there Heifetz’ studio recording with Toscanini for missing bars, but even after adjusting speed and pitch to make both match, this didn’t seem to be confirmed. Maybe someone who has the Doremi set can comment and indicate if the same thing is there.
You sure can’t say of Heifetz that he easily changed his mind. Rather, he was of the kind of performer who, once he had adopted a certain interpretation, would no more budge. He made two studio recordings of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, the first in 1940 for RCA Victor with Toscanini (link will open new tab to my review), and a stereo remake with Munch in 1955 (first CD reissue in 1985 on RCA RCD1-5402 barcode 07863554022 and RD85402 barcode 0035628540225); there is also a live from Boston and Munch from a couple of days before on West Hill Radio Archives’ “Charles Munch Conducts Beethoven” set, WHRA-6014, barcode 4015023160149, and a live performance with Rodzinksi and the New York Philharmonic from 1945, which I have on Music & Arts CD-766 (2) barcode 017685076626. They are all essentially the same – which makes them unique in the interpretive vista of the composition: they are uniquely urgent, martial in the orchestral tutti of the first movement and on the opposite pole from the more expansive and lyrical approach that is now associated with the Concerto, uniquely flowing and unlingering in the Larghetto, uniquely swift, boisterous and dancelike in the Finale. And all this has led the Heifetz detractors (and even some Heifetz supporters), while recognizing the awesome digital virtuosity, to chastize him for being superficial, purely virtuosic if not mechanical, inflexible, ungiving, unmusical.
But what Heifetz detractors, focusing as they do on matters of tempi, don’t seem to hear, is how uniquely, within this very urgency of pulse, his violin sings. Heifetz is the very opposite of “mechanical”, he fills each phrase, each note not just with his luminous and vibrant tone, but with unparalleled expressive touches, sotto voces, infinitesimal portamentos and slides, subtle dynamic shadings. Heifetz has a unique way of singing with his violin, as a soprano of his days would have, and I’ve never heard anyone else approach it. This is what makes his interpretation of the Concerto, for all its breathless urgency, still an immensely lyrical one. The urgency of tempo may require some getting used to – and once you do, it paints Beethoven’s Concerto in different colors, more turbulent, breathless and dramatic, which I find very welcome and convincing, showing that the image of the Concerto as an essentially if not uniformly lyrical work is just a matter of interpretation; but the songfulness, the expressivity just call for a good set of ears, and a readiness to listen.
That said, this version with Koussevitzky is the most high-strung, martial and inflexible of all: Koussevizky just forges ahead, martial, even sergeant-instructorish, with no great inflexion. In fact, in the first movement, this performance holds the world speed record of all the versions I’ve heard (and I’ve heard many). In AS Disc’s transfer the cadenza is reached in 16:32, to Munch’s 16:52 (and the version with Munch could be seen already as being too high-strung and lacking a touch of flexibility) and Toscanini’s 17:24. And it’s not the orchestral introduction that makes the difference, it is very comparable to Toscanini’s and Munch’s. It’s after, all those small passages which invite to relax even imperceptibly and sing larger (and Heifetz with Toscanini did, and even with Munch, though to a lesser extent), are here kept urgent. The vibrancy, songfulness and expressivity remain in Heifetz’ tone and phrasings, but they are more straight-laced.
The second and third movements are also, each time by a few seconds and up to twenty between fastest and slowest, Heifetz’ most urgent – meaning, then, also the most urgent ever recorded (among those I heard, but I don’t expect to meet ever faster), but there it matters less. The emotion elicited by Heifetz in the Larghetto was never a matter of tempo, but again of the unique songfulness and inflexions of his phrasings, within a very flowing tempo, and a few seconds more or less don’t change anything to that. As for the Finale, each time its brisk tempo conveyed a unique spirit of dance and boisterous animation, and there again the few seconds more or less don’t change anything. It does change, perhaps, for the orchestra, not always perfectly together at the Hollywood Bowl, and with an amusing blooper from the horns at one point. Not that it matters. Needless to say, Heifetz is not JUST hugely expressive: he plays with superhuman cleanness, clarity, precision – and just one or two minuscule slips, as if to show that he IS, after all, only human.
This performance, then, has a definite value for Heifetz collectors and people seriously interested in the study of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto: it is, quite simply, the most radical performance ever committed to disc. That said, it is probably TOO radical to be a basic building block of anybody’s library. Again, the value of Heifetz lies not so much in his break-neck speeds, as in his unique art of singing. If you want Heifetz and you want radical, Heifetz’ stereo recording with Munch is quite radical in its own right and comes in stupendous stereo: that’s the recording that belongs to any basic collection (and a “basic” collection should have at least three recordings, Heifetz’ radically fast, Suk’s radically slow, and at least one “middle-of-the-road”, and there are loads of possible choices for that, which means one is not enough). Independent of sonics, Heifetz’ best performance, in my opinion, because the most flexible within his urgent tempos, is the live performance with Rodzinsky in New York in 1945 – and the sonics are excellent for the vintage, better than those afforded to the studio recording with Toscanini. But then, between “the best” performance and “the second best”, the differences are marginal, and the 1955 stereo with Munch makes it the first choice.
As for Prokofiev’s Concerto, AS Disc and Cembal d’Amour both ascribe this performance to April 2, 1949, but James H. North, in his authoritative BSO discography, corrects that into April 1, adding “bootleg recording made in the hall by a Boston recording studio”. Obviously I can’t comment on the tranfers of Cembal d’Amour; on AS Disc the sonics are more distant than for the Beethoven Concerto from a year later, and more distant than on Heifetz and Koussevitzky’s 1937 studio recording (on RCA’s Heifetz Collection, Volume 4 – 1935-1939, 09026-61735-2 barcode 090266173525 or Biddulph LAB 018 barcode 0744718001828 with Sibelius’ Concerto and Strauss’ Violin Sonata, see my review on Amazon.com pending repost here), and the ratio of music to background noise is fairly low, but after a while the ear adjusts. Faint clicks and pops testify to a recording on acetates rather than on tape, but they are kept very hushed and are not disturbing. It’s hard to tell where the microphone was located, but apparently, closer to the back than to the front: in the second movement clarinets and flutes sound as if they were closer than the fiddler – nice for their dialogues, but not entirely realistic, unless you are an orchestral flute or clarinet player. You can also hear the castagnets in the Finale – you couldn’t on the 1937 studio recording – and enough of the bass drum in the coda to realize that he is totally lost in the 5/4 rhythms. The violin is at times covered by the orchestra, especially when playing in its lower registers, which is annoying particularly in the Finale, as sometimes you wonder if Heifetz is playing at all. But the unique vibrancy of his tone certainly comes through, and so does a reasonable amount of orchestral details – not always realistically, one hopes: the horns sound very potent, and almost like trombones.
So, Heifetz and Koussevitzky had made the premiere recording of Prokofiev’s Second Concerto in 1937 and in fact, in 1949, they still had the field all to themselves. The next studio recording came only in 1952, and it was Francescatti with Mitropoulos in New York for Columbia (collected in Sony’s Masterworks Heritage series, “Zino Francescatti: Great Violin Concertos”, MH2K 62339 barcode 074646233924). There was also an East-German recording by Heinz Stanske and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under Franz Konwitschny that was published in Europe at the end of 1951 (on a 10” Chant du Monde in France – link will open new tab to listing on Discogs.com; I haven’t found trace of an East-German edition), and one by Helmut Drescher and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Schreiber (link to listing on Discogs.com), issued in the US on the label Royale in circa 1954, the first to pair the two concertos on a single LP (haven’t found a European edition either). Incredibly, I’ve found no trace of a Soviet recording before Kogan-Kondrashin, which I think was recorded in 1956.
As always, and in view of the subsequent competition, Heifetz had been very swift in 1937; and in fact slightly faster in the first two movements than Prokofiev’s carefully-conceived metronome indications (108 quarter-notes/mn in the first and 108 eighth-notes/mn in a ternary 12/8 measure in the second – in each Heifetz was at circa 120), but at least there he had maintained the remarkable tempo relationship between the two movements, which very few of his subsequent colleagues have cared to do. Not so in the Finale, however, not because he was too fast, but because he was spot on Prokofiev’s 72 dotted half-note/mn – which, if you do a simple computation, makes 216 quarter-notes/mn, e.g. double the basic pulse of the two other movements. In his 1959 stereo remake with Munch (first CD reissue in 1986, American edition RCD1-7019 barcode 07863570192, European edition RD87019 barcode 0035628701923), he was even faster (Heifetz often was in his stereo remakes, as if to prove that age had no impact on his technical mastery).
But in 1949, he’s faster still – helter-skelter even in the first movement. But what is remarkable, even jaw-dropping, is that he maintains the same tempo relationship: he’s at 132 in the first movement (which is exactly 10 % faster than in his 1937 recording – and in a movement that, under the bows of most violinists, unfolds peacefully and lyrically, that is helter-skelter), 132 in the second, and 116 in the Finale (= 7 percent faster). Talk about a sense of proportions! Past the breathless first movement, none of that sounds exaggerated or unnatural. The middle Andante assai in particular may be taken at a flowing march rhythm, but the unique songfulness of Heifetz isn’t a matter of tempo, but of the vibrancy and luminosity of his tone and of all the vocal inflexions that he brought to each phrase. When you sing like that, you don’t need a slower tempo.
That said, even if Cembal d’Amour had been able to greatly improve the sonics of AS Disc, this can’t replace Heifetz’ two “official” recordings – the later one preferable on account of its glorious stereo sonics, the former preferable on account of its greater lyrical abandon. AS Disc is for the Heifetz (and/or Koussevitzky) completist.