I can believe the never practice alright. I love Vanguard but I pass

on this .

Joseph Szigeti has not the spritual embodied respiration of Szeryng, no one has anyway, he was not a virtusoso like the god Heifetz, his tone dont have the perfect transparency or sun-light quality of a Milstein or a Grumiaux...

But why a so powerful, expressive, sometimes " unclean" tone, tear our heart apart, when listening this Bach interpretation with a powerful rythmic constrasted almost unbalanced control like someone walking near an abyss, on par with the best violonist, but so personal that it was completely unheard before or after...Nobody among all violonist nowadays will dare to play like that in a so risky dance on one leg sometimes and near the fall....

Perhaps the less " perfect" of all versions i love, but one of the most expressive one and one which sound like a complete improvisation....

And this explain perhaps why : " In 1923 Ysaÿe set about composing his most extraordinary music: the Six Solo Violin Sonatas, op.27. It was a recital by Joseph Szigeti of Bach’ sonatas and partitas that set Ysaÿe on the path to composing these works."

«Imperfection is the peak» René Char

The Vanguard people like Japan with Ervin Nyiregyházi clean very well the old recording with the best possible audiophile sound mix...One of the less known great Bach interpretation...These two hungarian masters, one on violin the other on piano, had something in common in their "sound" and expressive movement, they never practice to be better they only play the more powerfully they could...Volcanos never study or practice before eruption...

At the end music is a complete mystery and any musician is unique and incomparable, but in love like in music we must chose one god, one wife, or one mistress, and many friends....

Wow! i never listened to this one...

Spoken words through music.... Thanks 

Then see this , our man is playing LvB trio with two of THE best on piano and

Bass in the world ! Concert is in Bonn , no mistakes there !

During rest all throw what and how things should be . And they don’t put their 2 cents in, more like their million bucks .

Not in English , no need  anyway .

I like your post.... The most stubborn philosopher i ever read was a Polish genius : Wronski... Balzac wrote a complete novel about him : "the search for the absolute"...

😊😊😊😊😊

Szeryng had a technic that he was is in complete control of in every second he played,

I never heard anyone like him ,   

He was Polish . No one is more stubborn than they .

r

Frogman being a musician smile at me for sure, but being a wise one he know that even passive listener could experience music also as a spiritual embodied event...

Thank you jim559 for your kind words...

I agree with you mahgister, and really admire your intellect.

As you say you and I are in the audience and I gather frogman is in the band .

He will hear things you and I will never hear , or want to and vice -versa .

I forgot to thank

jim5559

For reminding me and us about this interpration....

I apologize for my passionnate embrace of ONE interpretation..

But when someone could discover that we listen ALWAYS in fact with our lung inhaling/exhilarating body participation is it not surprizing?

For me it was with this album i experienced it consciously for the first time in my life 35 five years ago....Dietrich-Fischer- Dieskau would had smile at me for sure and taught me a lesson about singing...Any playing jazz musicians sax or trumpeters would have smile at me too...

And what appear as a miracle for me is only an usual phenomenon for most musicians and singers...But i am only a listener...And many in audio thread are like i was anyway, they think that we listen only with our ears...

Merry christmast to you and to all

My favorite violin interpretation ever, not because he is the best violonist no more than the more perfect virtuoso... Not at all listen to Milstein and Heifetz for this...

Like said once the great poet Rene Char : "imperfection is the peak" ....

Disembodied static "perfection" is always UNDER embodied living "imperfection" like this Szeriyng interpretation here...

No other interpretation vehicle a so deep spiritual charge, it is no more simply violin playing here... Only a miracle... You can verify with another more sound perfected version by Szeryng in 1967 for Deutsch after this 1955 unique version... He is no more a match for himself anymore... I sold this 1967 version after one listen.... Miracle happen once...

This album is my violin love forever....We can sense the heart beat of spiritual respiration of a soul inhaling the cosmos...Is it music?  Embodied music of the sphere here , too intense to be only beautiful....Uniting body and world....Bach must have played like that or would have wanted be able to play like that....Bach for me is IN this work like the Fournier version of the cello opus for the same reason on par with one of the Starker version ( they are five beware)....

Ok the sound is not the best possible it is not so well balanced but so what? i discarded all other well recorded version, BECAUSE our RESPIRATION change listening this and i discovered listening this that we listen with our body then with our LUNG/heart not only with our ears....This is a YOGA lesson in the listening and playing art... Respiration as a cosmic fact...

Schopenhauer was right, music place us in the noumenal dimension of the world where there is no more a listening and a playing body, no mere an internal subjectivity in front of an objective world... Only one cosmic respiration like the AUM of the Indian cosmologist...

I agree re Perlman.  Certainly a great player, but hard to match the restrained sophistication of expression of Milstein.  For instance, his glissandi are, in fact, a little “thick”.  His Glazunov “Meditation” is beautiful, but FOR ME, when he makes a glissando from one note to the other he accentuates the glissando a little much with the effect of sounding dangerously close to the overly dramatic.  With Milstein the glissando doesn’t draw attention to itself and away from the melodic line.  

For me , this is bringing out the HEAVY artillery.

Indeed., I put mine in with "the Lark " .

More often than not Perlman is , great as he is, a bit thick for me. Just thought

I’d try him and he seemed on the spot with Glazunov .

Lovely “Meditation” by Perlman. Meditation of a different kind:

The Glazunov is a very great concerto!

Seems like he has Meditation to me.  I love this .

That Glazunov has so MUCH to say,I have one somewhere but doubt if it could

begin to do this Milstein .

I listened to it three times yesterday and my small brain said 3 times Glazunov is telling his life .

In any event he has something that is as good as any other and better than many!

The orchestra is stunning .

t

I don’t know much but I did think like frogman’s cushion and why I made

PERFECTION .

The Great Leipzig Gewandhaus had men only from Leipzig Conservatory for over 200 years.

Stopped slowly after DDR collapsed which made me think Masur might  be  good for divas in US .

As the DDR was  in riot Masur walked among alone talking people to calm the mob  and  he did much .

. Masur is still beloved in Leipzig.

One word, globalization.  This has led to a certain standardization of approaches to playing as opposed to in the past when there was more emphasis (acceptance) on a more personal approach.  The same can be said of soloists on any instrument, not just violin and piano.  On a “larger” scale the result of this globalization can be clearly heard in the major orchestras whose previously very distinctive personalities have become somewhat homogenized due to the phenomenon of the prevalence of the traveling guest conductor and, even more recently, principal players from different parts of the world who are the product of different “schools” and their respective approaches.

Btw, on the wonderful Milstein/Horowitz Brahms clip, I think that rv’s astute observation re tuning is, more than anything, a result of pitch instability in the playback of the recording.  Obvious with the piano’s sound which doesn’t have the more forgiving “cushion” of the violin’s vibrato.  
 

Yes these older violinists could teach today's young violinists a few lessons if they were still here. As in pianists the older ones are just as good as the young ones of today

Milstein’s Bach exquisite!

‘He was one of those wonders of nature.

As he aged, lost very little if anything at all.

Szeryng, Very, very fine violinist.

One of the best!

I have always liked the tech solid sound of this Polish artist that seems to have got little love here  when he was alive , or dead for that matter .

MY favorite Violinist does the unreal at  82  !

Great taste 204 !

Milstein was almost a brother to Horovitz and stayed with them for some years.

He is my favourite Bach violinist, his chaconne in D minor is awesome.

Yes, perfection!

My favorite violinist and pianist together.

Red Hot!

I believe they left Russia at the same time.

Oddly, the piano is not in great tune.

And more Perfection before noon . Ahhh  I meant PERFECTION . 

I hear Brahms , And I look like Lupus brother .

This receives  play at least once a week with the Great Lupu at the helm at my house.

Brahms would be in my top 5 if they still had that type of contests !

Gorgeous playing.  Thanks.

Was listening to this other great Brahms sonata just last night.  Dedicated to Richard Muhlfeld whose playing inspired and caused Brahms to come out of “retirement”: 

No doubt   about this great Brahms piece or Suks ability with it .

No doubt about this Brahms Sonata.

I

On the subjects of Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story), young music students, and “what is Classical music?”.  From a great (American) musical mind:

Melm, you miss the point. Moreover, why the need to be so heavy handed? As I said, I don’t disagree with you about Ashokan. No desire to argue, but the particulars of your “argument” leave something (much) to be desired.

There'll always be tunes & performances that exist somewhere between genres. Stop worrying. Love the bomb. ...I mean, the music.

SAying that a duck is a duck is not the peak of knowledge...

Everybody know what a folk tune is...

And everybody know that some melodic line and simple harmony could be also deep music in a way we dont understand...

a duck is a duck only for walking unobservant distracted person...

No duck are like one another, even between ducks there is someting called individuality that pointed to somethink else about "ducks"...

Folk tune are not always only folk tune, they are sometimes key formula in esthetical and in spiritual experience...

The line between folk tune and classical music is not a THIN PERFECT line...

If it was so music would be not a so deep mystery....Ask Bartok...

By the way what i just said is almost common place not an "irrefutable point"..  because there is no arguing here save for you...

But a duck is duck is also a common place affirmation but a bit more superficial...

I will say it my way: all folk tune are not made equal, and all folk tune are not only simple folk tune thats all...

Life is a mystery not always a common place habit...

This folk tune interrogate most people by his beauty and reveal why the frontier between folk music and sophisticated music is not a common place ethnomusical matter only... Bartok thought so....

I apologize for precising my point here...

I go back into my hole....

Merry christmast to all....

@frogman 

Some people just like to argue and like to fool themselves into believing they have made an irrefutable point.

Your post is ridiculous.  What you have referred me to is a series of didactic, pedagogic pieces written in a pseudo-classical style intended for young students learning the violin.  I have run across more than one of these in the Suzuki teaching series my son went through when he was about 9 years old.  In fact a recording of his playing a Seitz piece, one of those on this page, at that age is my ring-tone for him.  

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and waddles like a duck and has all the indicia of a duck, it's a duck.

Similarly, Ashokan Farewell has ALL the indicia of a folk tune.  It's a folk tune.

Please, let's all go on to something else.

Is the "AUM" sound, folk sound or classical?

Sometimes something is deeply moving in a way impossible to understand...

Distinguishing is good but we must not separate and oppose what we distinguish in opposing directions, one presumed primitive the other presumed sophisticated...

At the end for the heart what is deep may be simple and sophisticated at the same time, because succeeding to move all heart together is not a simple feat at all...

Then the "ashokan farewell" is folk tune yes, but so powerfully beautiful that Bach could have used it also... Like all "perfect" work of art it is more at the end a mystery than a folk tune for me...

Melm, I don’t disagree with you re Ashokan Farewell at all; that was not the thrust of my comments.  Where we may disagree, in part, is over the ultimate “importance of distinguishing” between genres, particularly when the distinction is based upon things such as technical ease of playing, simplicity of harmony, number of accidentals, etc; all characteristics which in fact can be found in some Classical works.  Those things are not what necessarily define a genre.  Btw, here are some violin works clearly in a Classical style played entirely in first position that may be of interest to you:

https://www.laurelthomsen.com/Violin_Geek_Blog/Entries/2020/9/6_First_Position_Beginning_Violin_Concerto_Repertoire.html

Anyone interested in superb fiddling get on to Idagio and listen to Leonidas Kavakos 's album Virtuoso for a musical delight. The playing is so easy for him and he programs flashy showpieces by 19th century virtuosos and arrangements of other so well known pieces.

Best fiddle playing I have heard for a while.

@frogman 

It's Important to distinguish between folk music and the classical music inspired by folk music.

There may be examples where they are hard to distinguish, but Ashokan Farewell is not one of them.  It is so very clearly on the folk music side.  First, watch Jay Ungar play.  He never leaves first position on the fiddle.  That is typical of folk music. I've never seen that on any piece considered classical.  It's a very easy, simple tune and the reason that millions of amateur fiddlers play that it, most often by ear.   The tune's simplicity is marked by having only one accidental note, one time anywhere within its two parts.  It has a VERY easy harmony.  I'm not much of a musician but I have improvised harmony on that tune as I play it on a folk instrument.  All of these are indications of simple a folk tune.  Also that its composition was inspired by other, traditional, folk tunes.  

So for Ashokan Farewell it's  not a close call--for a tune we all love!  But, just a good tune.

Hey frog, if that marvels you just imagine living in San Diego. Much of the water there is piped from the Colorado River but some comes from northern CA by way of LA, so that is several hundred miles. Of course everyone adds their upcharge along the way so it becomes very expensive by the time it reaches the consumer.

Sorry from the interlude from music.

Beautiful tune and beautifully played by Ungar. As to whether it is “Classical” or not, while I’m not sure where exactly the genre dividing line can be drawn, it should be remembered that quite a few Classical composers have incorporated the folk music of their native lands in their works. Antonio Dvorak, Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly, Manuel DeFalla, Ralph Vaughn Williams and in the USA, Aaron Copland of course, to name a few.

As to Ashokan, I know the area well. Beautiful area in upstate NY. Every time I drive by I marvel at how the water that comes out of my tap in NYC comes from a reservoir 130 miles away.

melm, thanks for the background on "Ashoken Farewell".

When Burns' film "The Civil War" was released I was fascinated by much of the music, so bought the CD soundtrack.  But I was particularly taken by "Ashoken Farewell" so also picked up Ungar's Fiddle Fever album which introduced that song.  I still find it beautiful and haunting.  No matter if it was not written as a tribute to the Civil War and those wounded or killed then, I felt it was a perfect choice by Burns.

I knew all that and was out to do nothing but the music.

The music is what I said it was, you or Ungar or not.

New York sent 450, 000 to the war 60,000 died and about

150.000 were VERY badly wounded .

All else is irrelevant .

This piece is  beautiful in any interpretation...

Amazing! Thanks it is a discovery for me....