Guy Braunstein: My Inspirational Violinists Top Five
Violinist Guy Braunstein presents a list of five giants of the instrument who changed the violin landscape forever – as performers, arrangers and inspirational collaborators of the great composers.
Read more…Pablo de Sarasate
Besides being a virtuoso performer, Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908) enriched the violin repertoire like almost no one else. He produced his own compositions and did transcriptions – everybody knows the 'Carmen' Fantasy, of course, and the gypsy themes that he took and structured into 'Zigeunerweisen'. But he also had some of the top composers of the era compose for him: Wieniawski, Saint-Saëns, Lalo and even Bruch, who wrote the Scottish Fantasy for him. The violin literature would have been very different without Sarasate. For a recording, I’ve gone for the “Carmen” Fantasy played by Perlman. Of course I know, when I listen to it, that there’s a gap of between 80 and 90 years between when it was written and when this recording was made, but Perlman fools me and makes me think that either he himself wrote it or that Sarasate wrote it for him.
Joseph Joachim
We can say the same for Joseph Joachim (1831–1907): he was a wonderful composer, even though not many of his original compositions – shorter pieces and even concertos – are heard today. He was the dedicatee of concertos by Brahms and Dvořák; he advised them and pretty much composed the violin parts of the concertos with them. He arranged a lot of their works, too, like Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, and wrote cadenzas for lots of concertos: Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, you name it! He also had a string quartet, which championed many of the great works of the time. They were the first to perform many of Brahms’s string quartets, and Joachim, together with the cellist from the quartet, premiered the Double Concerto. So, again, you take him out of the equation and our literature looks very different. I’ve chosen to represent him with the Brahms Concerto, and I think the best performance I know is by Joseph Szigeti, with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Fritz Kreisler
Again, with Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962), what would the violin literature look like without him? One of my all-time favourites, the Elgar Violin Concerto, was written for him, and you can almost hear throughout that Elgar was crazy about Kreisler’s playing. Kreisler wrote many of his own shorter pieces too and transcribed many more – and he was perhaps the greatest master of this art, because he had the guts to reharmonize these works and make them his own. He saw it as his mission, besides his wonderful violin playing (evident in all the recordings he did in Berlin with the Staatskapelle), to enlarge the literature.
Leopold Auer
Leopold Auer (1845–1930) was the inspiration for my Tchaikovsky album. Even though he was of Hungarian origin and a student of Joachim, he spent most of his life in Russia – in St Petersburg – very close to Tchaikovsky, Glazunov & Co, before emigrating to America in very old age. I’m not aware of any original compositions by him, but he was the dedicatee of many great Russian concertos of the era, and they all admired his playing. Pretty much everything Tchaikovsky wrote that involves a solo violin was written for him, including the symphonies and ballets, where Auer came and played the concertmaster solos. One of the tracks on my album is the Letter Scene from 'Eugene Onegin'. Of course Auer didn’t write it, but I made the transcription thinking that if he’d lived a little bit longer that’s how he would have done it!
Jascha Heifetz
I have to be a little ambivalent when I speak about Heifetz (1901–1987). He grew up and became famous around the time that 12-tone music came along, and he really didn't like it. He wasn’t happy about music becoming so dissonant and atonal, and in fact I know he told my old teacher, Chaim Taub, "I will come to your quartet concert if you promise not to play Bartók or Hindemith or any of that kind of stuff, because I don’t consider it music at all." So he looked for his comfort somewhere else, with Gershwin, for example. Again, in the spirit of Fritz Kreisler, he took total freedom to recompose – usually through the piano part but sometimes through double stops – with the harmonic language that even the composer of the original work did not imagine.