Word: beethoven
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...exception, every one of the greater music critics--such as Rellstab, Hoffman, Heine, Schumann, Hanslick and G. B. Shaw--owes that greatness almost exclusively to what he wrote about the composer and his music, not about the performance. Be this as it may, when the CRIMSON reviewer referred to Beethoven's "middle period" (Oct. 5), he was making an astute comment, and concerning performance at that...
...should like to suggest that the CRIMSON make an endeavor to remove the schoolboy tone from its music reviews. There is no doubt that its reviewers have conscientiously taken Music I, that they are eternally aware of thematic structure, of the "Middle Period" in Beethoven, of the beauties of pre-Baroque music; let them also discover that the function of a music critic is not to review the Beethoven Violin Concerto, but to review its performance...
Hilsberg got his early violin training in the same St. Petersburg prodigy factory that turned out Heifetz and Milstein. But he has no regrets that he did not contiue a career of concert fiddling. "I could Vt stand up there and play again and again the Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms [concerti]. That is like being a painter and being handed a palette with only a few colors. Conducting, you have all the colors you could possibly want...
Jascha Heifetz, who has appeared with the Boston Symphony on and off since 1919, played the work for which he is perhaps most famous: the Beethoven D major concerto. This glorious composition, generally regarded as THE Violin Concerto, is a perfect fusion of the Classical and the Romantic in music. The collaboration of Heifetz and Munch resulted in a skillful blending of Classic clarity and Romantic richness. Heifetz performed with even greater fluency than in his definitive recording with Toscanini. He played with great insight, and tossed the many cadenza-like passages with uncanny ease...
Conducting the Beethoven Concerto is no easy task. The accompaniment is more than mere background music; it is of vital thematic importance. In fact, the persistent five-beat pattern provides the basis for the whole first movement. Munch's direction was entirely satisfactory, except for his failure to bring the accompaniment out strongly enough in the finale...