Word: oistrakh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mozart, Violin Concertos Nos. 1 to 5, Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 364 (and other works) (David Oistrakh, soloist and conductor, Berlin Philharmonic; Angel, 4 LPs, $23.92). The riddle of the Sphinx is nothing compared with the mystery of Mozart interpretation. How else explain the existence of so many otherwise great men of music (Horowitz, Stokowski, to name but two) among the ranks of failed Mozarteans? David Oistrakh is emphatically not one of them. His playing (that curvaceous tone especially) has a touch of the romantic, but not enough to tarnish the piquant bloom of youth that imbues...
That, to put it mildly, is something of an exaggeration. A talented Jew can rise to great eminence in Soviet society, as have Violinist David Oistrakh and Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, but the ordinary Jew is subject to rigid quotas that often bar him from universities and good jobs. Teaching Judaism and Hebrew is illegal; Yiddish culture is severely restricted. In the streets, Russia's traditional anti-Semitism has never really died. "We may not be victims of physical genocide," says Mikhail Zand, a distinguished philologist who recently managed to get out of Russia and settle in Israel...
...rigidly centralized economic control, and his ideas are now widely emulated in Eastern Europe. An estimated one-third of the Soviet Academy of Sciences is Jewish. Bolshoi Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and perhaps 90% of the Bolshoi Orchestra are Jewish, as are Violinists Leonid Kogan and David Oistrakh and Pianist Emil Gilels. Nor do the Soviet Jews face the open, rampant persecution that German Jews endured in Hitler's Third Reich. But that is small consolation for the vast majority of Russia's 3,500,000 Jews who suffer job discrimination, racial slurs, and the anxiety that arises...
SYMPHONY NO. 4, BRUNO WALTER AND THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC (Odyssey); RAFAEL KUBELIK AND THE BAVARIAN RADIO SYMPHONY (Deutsche Grammophon); DAVID OISTRAKH AND THE MOSCOW PHILHARMONIC (Angel/Melodiya). This seraphic, fairy-tale score is the best introduction to Mahler. Bruno Walter's 23-year-old classic recording is rechanneled for stereo, with less bass than the original mono, but more polish in the middles and highs. Those who want a modern recording will like Kubelik's lithe and luminous version. The interpretation by Violinist-turned-Conductor Oistrakh is, unfortunately, unsympathetic and at times eccentric...
...clear as ever-embarrassingly so at times-and some of his melodic writing in the first movement is downright dull. But the elegiac sweep of the middle adagio movement and the jauntiness of the finale compensate admirably for these shortcomings. The concerto is not quite a masterpiece, but Oistrakh and the Moscow Philharmonic under Conductor Kiril Kondrashin perform it as though it were...