Great Performers: David Oistrakh
There used to be a joke in Odessa: if a child walks down the street without a violin case, you can tell they play the piano. Certainly, at the beginning of the last century Ukraine's fourth-largest city produced pianists the calibre of Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter and violinists including Nathan Milstein and one of the all-time greats – David Oistrakh.
Read more…On stage Oistrakh's presence may have seemed impassive, but Soviet players didn't go for the antics of some players today. There's a similar solidity to his sound and a lack of fuss to his phrasing. Combine his humility with perfect intonation, an imaginative use of colour and character, a vocal sense of line (his mother was in the chorus of the local opera), poetic sensibility and philosophical intelligence (he was a keen chess player) and a technique that brooked no obstacles to musical intention, and the result is interpretations that run deep and often seem ultimate.
Born in 1908, by the age of five Oistrakh was studying violin with Pyotr Stolyarsky, graduating from the Odessa Conservatory in 1926 with the premiere of Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, the composer in the audience. Thanks to this early curiosity for new music, we have many fine 20th-century works, including concertos written for him by Glazunov, Kabalevsky, Khachaturian and Myaskovsky. Shostakovich wrote both his violin concertos for Oistrakh and, given the violinist's input with revisions, his performances might be deemed seminal.
He made his Leningrad debut in 1928 and in Moscow in 1929 and in the early 1930s won several international violin competitions (although he came second to a 15-year-old Ginette Niveu in the 1935 Wieniawski Competition in Warsaw). A promising international career was put on hold with the war and he had to stay in Russia. During this time he was able to develop his chamber music partnership with pianist Lev Oborin and cellist Sviatoslav Knushevitsky – they play the Smetana Piano Trio here.
As a result of the war, but despite the ensuing Cold War, he made his UK debut only in 1954 and in the US in 1955, but by then he was known abroad thanks to his Russian recordings: when tickets went on sale for his Carnegie Hall debut the queue numbered 7,000. You won't find much virtuoso repertoire in his discography – show-off tricks weren't his thing – but you only have to listen to the passagework of his Sibelius or Tchaikovsky to trust that he had technique to spare if he'd been interested and charm aplenty. Nor is there much Bach: his live recording of the "Double" with Yehudi Menuhin may shock historians with its ponderous speeds and rich sound, but it is majestic and expressive. Similarly, his Tartini is strong, bordering on aggressive, but in this most simple of music you hear his musical intelligence finding completely different characters from note to note and beautifully nuanced phrasing (again, not one for purists).
Maybe one thinks of this rich tone as the antithesis of Debussy, and yet in that composer's Sonata he finds a whole new palette of colours, as well as idiomatic slides – similarly in the Szymanowski, the Catoire, whose charming work he is still one of the few to have championed, and the rather Debussy-like early Messiaen. Oistrakh's nobility is perfectly suited to Beethoven and the Triple Concerto included here offers the added value and perfectly mirroring interplay of Richter and cellist Mstistlav Rostropovich.
Oistrakh had a history of heart disease, suffering his first heart attack in 1964 and a fatal one in Amsterdam in 1974, aged only 65. Thankfully he left behind a broad discography – 63 composers ranging from Aulin to Zarzyky – to explore.
[Due to geo-blocking restrictions, some tracks might be unavailable in certain territories.]