SZIGETI The European Columbia Recordings, Volume 2 (1926-36) - PASC660

Joseph Szigeti was born in Budapest in 1892. After showing promise on the violin at a very young age, he was accepted as a student by Jenő Hubay and made his Berlin debut at thirteen. Shortly thereafter, he settled in England for several years. It was during this period that he met Ferruccio Busoni, who was to become a major influence in moving the young prodigy from being merely a talented virtuoso toward becoming a more intellectual and analytical musician.

A stay in a Swiss sanatorium in 1913 to treat his tuberculosis introduced Szigeti to a fellow Hungarian who was to become another major influence on him as a musician and a lifelong friend, Béla Bartók. Szigeti remained in Switzerland for several years, teaching and expanding his facility in playing chamber works. In 1925, he played for a visiting Leopold Stokowski, and was quickly invited to make his American debut. He shortly became established internationally as a concert artist. He settled in the USA in 1940, and continued his concert career for another twenty years before retiring to write and teach. He died in 1973.

Szigeti’s earliest recordings were made in England for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company between 1908 and 1913. He made no further discs during the acoustic era, save for a handful recorded in Russia in either 1924 or 1926. In the latter year, he began an association with English Columbia that lasted for eleven years, with one session for their Japanese affiliate in 1931 that produced four sides. In 1938, he began recording for American Columbia, where he remained until 1956, with one set (the Bloch Concerto) done for French Columbia in 1939, a single disc made for the American New Music Quarterly label in 1941, and a return to English Columbia for four sides in 1946. His final recordings were made for Mercury in 1959-61.

This series will present all of the Columbia recordings he made in Britain, France and Japan, as well as the one New Music Quarterly disc, as a complement to Sony’s recent set comprising his American Columbia recordings. From the 1940s onward, Szigeti began to experience increasing technical problems. American Columbia passed on releasing his 1955-56 recordings of Bach Sonatas and Partitas as well as several contemporaneous LPs’ worth of Mozart Sonatas, which were only issued later by Vanguard. Szigeti himself ruefully referred to his final Mercury LPs as his “posthumous recordings”. The performances featured here and in the coming volumes are generally judged to be his finest on disc.

Our second volume focuses on Classical and early Romantic repertoire. Szigeti recorded the Beethoven concerto three times, twice with Bruno Walter conducting. Their New York remake of fifteen years later is quite similar in concept to the 1932 London version presented here, even down to the timings (the last two movements are each within a second of each other, while the first differs by a few more seconds due to a variant at the end of the cadenza). Szigeti’s earlier performance has a headlong forward momentum which was somewhat lacking in the later, somewhat more cautious version.

The Paganini Caprices come from a transitional period when violinists were beginning to leave behind the Ferdinand David-composed piano accompaniments and to play them as the composer originally intended. Both versions of Caprice No. 24 used the piano arrangement. The first from 1926 was shorn of repeats in order to fit it on two ten-inch sides. Two years later, Szigeti would remake it complete on a twelve-inch disc. The other two Caprices made a few years later were played without accompaniment. Szigeti would not return to this repertoire subsequently in his recording career, so their presence here is doubly valuable.

Mark Obert-Thorn