Symposium's The Great Violinists Volume XXIII is an advanced entry in a series that stretches back to 1989; beginning as a comprehensive survey of historic violinists, it evolves into a sort of catch-all, "violinists as we find them" type of series, though it is not the worse for that. It includes a bit more of
Jacques Thibaud's earliest recordings, made in Paris in 1904 and 1905, than is generally seen in one place. Symposium has anthologized
Thibaud's Bach Gavotte from the Suite in E before. It is an astounding performance, as is his rendering of a virtuoso piece from times past, Martin Marsick's Scherzando.
Thibaud effortlessly glides through the music, with difficult passagework and ornaments played so quickly it's almost like his fingers are able to generate them without touching the strings.
Joseph Szigeti, just 17 when he made his earliest recordings in 1908, plays the Preludio from Bach's Suite in E major at breakneck speed and with unthinkable articulation; it appears almost superhuman. No one would play Bach this way in the twenty-first century, but if you could, why wouldn't you want to?
Szigeti's playing is just loaded with youthful enthusiasm, charm, and charisma; he's clearly trying to put on a show and just blazes through the ancient recording.
The remaining players, Franz Ondricek and Jules Boucherit, didn't record very extensively, and for good reason. Ondricek, who gave the world premiere of the Dvorák Violin Concerto, was born in 1859 and died in 1922, Boucherit lived into the 1960s but illness forced him to give up his concert career in 1921. In the case of Boucherit, his piano accompanist is Louis Diémer, a major French pianist of the nineteenth century whose only solo recordings are marred by bad sound and a lack of clean surviving copies. He is heard somewhat better on these 1906 items with Boucherit, but the pieces themselves are not very substantive, not even Diémer's own Caprice Scherzando, Op. 48, clearly written to benefit the violinist, not the accompanist.
Hundred-year-old recordings yield only highly variable results, though the worst sounding thing on this collection is the most recent,
Thibaud's 1920 account of
Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. This is still notable in that it's a relatively complete performance of the piece spread over two sides and accompanied by a full orchestra. There is an unmistakable amount of filtering applied to the first two
Thibaud selections that make them near unlistenable. Everything is blocked out except for the immediate, detectable sound of the violin, rather like inspecting its audio spectrum through a window that's only open a crack. This results in a bright, penetrating sound that affects the listener a little bit like the way sunlight effects Count Dracula. However, the other
Thibaud selections are fine, and as expected, a bit noisier, though tolerable owing to their properties of warmth and some space around the instruments.
Both
Thibaud and
Szigeti would go on to record often and well, in better sound. They lived in a time when violinists tended all to be individualists; while there were great pedagogues like
Carl Flesch, Jenö Hubay, and Leopold Auer, no two of their students sounded quite the same. A hundred years on, the opposite is true; idealized kinds of violin tone and methods of instruction and technique are "king," and it can be harder to find the true individualists in the pack. That's why collections like Symposium's The Great Violinists Volume XXIII remain so valuable; they give insight into what might have been lost in terms of all these different styles of playing, and maybe even some that we can gain back.