– Wolfgang Schneiderhahn, violin/London Symphony Orchestra/ Istvan Kertesz/Carl Seemann, piano
BBC Legends BBCL 4217-2, 75:59 (Distrib. Koch) ****:
Wolfgang Schneiderhahn (1915-2002) had a versatile and distinguished career in music– if not in politics–the natural successor to Georg Kulenkampff in German solo music-making and chamber ensemble. His collaboration with Wilhelm Furtwaengler in the Beethoven Violin Concerto still ranks as among the most powerfully Dionysiac inscriptions on record, and his Tchaikovsky Concerto with Vaclav Talich generates an aura entirely unique. His range in music extended from Mendelssohn to Martin, Bach to Schoeck. Here, he collaborates with the Hungarian talent Istvan Kertesz (1929-1973), the extremely popular maestro who lost his life, foolishly, in a drowning accident in Israel. Kertesz opens the proceedings (13 March 1964) with a hefty, pesant account of the Egmont Overture which has some fur flying in the final pages, to which the audience responds most approvingly.
For his renditions of the Beethoven Concerto after 1962, Schneiderhahn prepared an arrangement of Beethoven’s piano cadenzas for the keyboard realization of this same concerto, which required transpositions of two-hand part-writing into single lines or double-stopped violin filigree. The presence of the tympani throughout makes for some extra drama this evening. The opening movement is huge, driven, albeit in the Apollinian mode, lyrically broad and urbane, with generous underpinnings from the tympani and brass. Schneiderhahn’s tone remains both sweet and biting, capable of an exalted cantilena floating on air as the orchestral tissue takes us scalewise through the pedal-points. The Larghetto proves a luxurious affair, and Beethoven’s tympanic pedal points segue into the vibrant Rondo: Allegro, the LSO oboe just as fervent as Schneiderhahn in his respective part. Kertesz adds a powerful, enthusiastic zest to the innate swagger of the music, and the “live” acoustic contributes to grand, satisfying account.
The Brahms Sonata (5 September 1956) derives from an Usher Hall, Edinburgh recital that pairs Schneiderhahn with his German collaborator Carl Seemann (1910-1983), who himself played the Beethoven B-flat Concerto with Kertesz. The Brahms reveals a more strident, passionate side of Schneiderhahn’s playing, often imposing on Brahms an
urgency–especially in the otherwise flighty Un poco presto e con sentimento third movement–we miss in others’ realizations of this somber, introspective work. The second and last movements bespeak two ardent advocates of Brahms, initiates into his lonely classicism who were not afraid to take musical and emotional risks.
— Gary Lemco
