The recordings on this disc were made between 1930 and 1938, while the career of Austrian violinist
Fritz Kreisler was still in full swing. They are excellent examples of his style, which was elegance itself. EMI's remastering job is superb; at the price of just a bit of surface noise, the sonic palette of
Kreisler's violin and the piano accompaniments comes through in startling fidelity. Better still is the selection of pieces included; although a few famous favorites are left out, that makes room for more of
Kreisler's arrangements of classical melodies from
Dvorák's Humoresque to less-familiar items such as Rimsky-Korsakov's Chanson hindoue, and for a few of
Kreisler's little-known forgeries of works from earlier eras of classical music. There are two pieces "in the style of Couperin" and one for string quartet, in the style of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, of all people. For quite a while,
Kreisler got away with passing these off as rediscovered old manuscripts. He eventually owned up to having written them himself, and from the perspective of the present day it's amazing that anyone was fooled. Yet these pieces point to
Kreisler's skill as a composer. There were more emotionally affecting violinists from this era, and there were players with a more chilling control over intonation. But
Kreisler was one of just a few who wrote distinctive works of their own and seemed to spontaneously create music audiences had never heard before. Everyone should hear
Kreisler perform favorites like Schön Rosmarin and the Liebesleid-Liebesfreud pair, and
Kreisler offers a marvelous version of "Danny Boy," here titled the Londonderry Air, eschewing the usual emotion in favor of a restrained reading that lets the melody's pentatonic outlines speak for themselves. That's the key to
Kreisler's greatness -- he was an interesting combination of musical thinker and crowd-pleaser, and his well-known lack of confidence about his compositional skills grew ultimately from his lack of role models in negotiating this unusual pairing. Unlike many items in EMI's Great Recordings of the Century series, this one is really a bedrock collection item. Fans of the various modern violinists influenced by
Kreisler, including
Joshua Bell and
Nigel Kennedy, should definitely have it.