On Music
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
MUSIC By Albert Goldman Oistrakh and the Objective Performance IT HAS BEEN a favorite idea among musicians for years now that the best interpretation of a piece of music is no interpretation at...
...These qualities seem strangely absent...
...Not only has he freed his playing of all mannerism, he has done something which even purists did not look for: He has restored to the violin its natural voice...
...The music is so enticing that even the stolid bear is made to dance...
...Toscanini was inspired by this ideal of objective performance...
...But he is always exciting, and sometimes he is much more...
...We hear more of the score than we ever thought possible, and what we hear is beautiful...
...Sometimes he achieves that identification of himself with the spirit of the music which has always been the ideal of the greatest interpretative artists...
...The value of this attitude can be determined only by experience, and our experience until recently was ambiguous...
...Aside from a few wrongheaded tempos, his performances are absolutely free of all eccentricities and exaggerations...
...When a score is performed without a controlling idea or interpretation, when every part is wrought out almost as if it were an end in itself, you have not music but the score...
...In almost every instance we feel that we are not having the full experience, that the meaning of the music has somehow been lost...
...In their view all one needs to perform a work perfectly is the technique to realize its every nuance and a historically accurate sense of style...
...Oistrakh is at his best when he is playing Russian music or tracing out the clear lines of some 18th century composer...
...The performance of a work of music requires that the performer have his mind focused on an idea and not on the score...
...Just as scientists must sometimes wait for years until the heavens confirm or deny their hypotheses, so amateurs of music have long sought the performer who, by fully realizing the modern ideal, would put the issue beyond dispute...
...This ideal of letting the music speak for itself has passed current among musicians because most of them don't realize how much their temperaments modify what they play...
...His sound is nothing more than the true character of the instrument raised to ideal perfection—no false glitter, no forced richness...
...MUSIC By Albert Goldman Oistrakh and the Objective Performance IT HAS BEEN a favorite idea among musicians for years now that the best interpretation of a piece of music is no interpretation at all...
...He has taken the violinist out of violin playing...
...Listen to him playing Mozart, and he is satisfying where Heifitz is not...
...Here no excitement poured on from without is needed...
...A man like Heifitz is closer to the idea of music than is Oistrakh...
...Infused in every bar of the score was his own grim personality lighting the music from within like a cold flame...
...They resent interpretation as the imposition of an alien personality upon the character of the music...
...Oistrakh is interesting just because he is unique...
...Now at last we have in David Oistrakh a performer who combines the fabulous technique of a great virtuoso with a fastidious sense of style that makes every phrase he plays a lesson in musicianship...
...His most astonishing quality is an almost divine impersonality...
...It takes us a while to stop marveling at the physical perfection of this playing and to ask the critical question—what has it done for the spiritual qualities of the music...
...His old performance of a Wieniawski concerto was so good, so profoundly true to the dreamy, nostalgic character of this music, that while listen-to it, I was persuaded the music was good...
...Where, we ask, is the profundity of Beethoven, the wit of Mozart, the exalted self-pity of Brahms...
...He at least communicates some emotion...
...People of this persuasion like to imagine a performance as a plate of glass through which one sees the notes and markings of the score itself...
...Of course, it is usually the same personality—tense, restless, forever pressing onward to the climaxes by irritable rushes across the intervening ground...
...The answer to this question is a truth which once would have needed no stating...
...He has a personality which enlivens everything he plays...
...Now we can see what happens to the classics of the violin repertoire, from the early Italian masters down to Brahms, when they are performed in the best modern manner...
...The example of Oistrakh is decisive...
...He has studied the score to discover its meaning, but once he has found that meaning he has entered a new realm of being—ideally, the very same world in which the composer dwelt who put these notes on paper...
...He certainly had the requisite technique, but who could say that his performances were simply straightforward renderings of the score...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 32
