Wieniawski: Concerto １

 STEREO  

SR-40185  

WIENIAWSKI: CONCERTO NO.1 IN F SHARP MINOR  

MOSCOW RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, GENNADY ROZHDESTVENSKY cond.  

DVORAK: CONCERTO IN A MINOR  

MOSCOW PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA, DAVID OISTRAKH cond.  

VIKTOR PIKAIZEN  

(VIOLIN)  


Newly Recorded in the USSR  


A certain brash young critic, astute in the ex¬  
treme and already destined for a fame far be¬  
yond the rarefied confines of music journalism,  
once remarked that "I am always inclined to  
believe in a violinist who can play Wieniawski.  
Beethoven and Mendelssohn were great com¬  
posers of music for the violin; but Wieniawski  
was a great composer of violin music. There is  
all the difference in the world between the two."  
Those who think that they detect a Shavian  
flavor in these wisely witty words will not find  
them in the three volumesful of wonderful criti¬  
cism generally entitled Music in London. In fact  
the author was indeed George Bernard Shaw, but  
this particular passage dates from a phase of his  
concert-hall peregrinations unaccountably not  
chronicled in Constable's so-called Standard Edi¬  
tion. It is to be found, nevertheless, in a review  
which appeared over his nom de machine a  
ecrire of "Corno di Bassetto" in the May 17th,  
1889, issue of The [Lonjdon] Star.  

And it is just possible that in those three short  
sentences G.B.S. said the last word on an ever  
rare and genetically improbable species of hy¬  
brid genius known as the violinist-composer. For  
the same distinction could be drawn with more  
or less equal efficacy in appraising such as Henri  
Vieuxtemps (1820-1881), Pablo de Sarasate (1844-  
1908), perhaps also Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931),  
and of course Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840)-by  
general assent the father of them all-in addition  
to Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880).  

Be that as it may, it was Wieniawski of whom  
Shaw was writing (specifically about the Legende,  
composed at Ostend in 1859 "under the spell of  
his ardent love" for an Englishwoman later to be  
his wife, as we are assured by C. R. Halski). And  
in several respects this passionate Pole was the  
veriest latter-day personification of the Paganin-  
ian archetype. Much of his biography reads like  
an implausible romantic novel, except that no  
novelist would expect us to believe in such an  
unlikely hero.  

Because he was the scion of a well-to-do  
Lublin family (Wieniawski pere was a distin¬  
guished military surgeon), Henryk's aptitudes  
fortunately posed no financial problems. His  
musicality must have been phenomenal right  
from the beginning. Already at age eight he had  
exhausted the resources of his second violin  
teacher, at whose suggestion he was then taken  
to Paris and, rather incredibly, admitted at once  
to the Conservatoire. The child made such rapid  
progress in all of his courses that within a year  
he became the youngest pupil ever to enter the  
advanced class of Lambert-Joseph Massart. This  
eminent pedagogue had seen plenty of talent in  
his time, but nothing like Wieniawski. By age  
eleven the boy was deemed ready to compete  
against all of his older colleagues for the much-  
coveted first prize in violin. He won it handily,  
along with a priceless Guarnerius "grace a la  
liberalite de TEmpereur Nicolas" (i.e. Nikolai  
Pavlovich Romanov, otherwise known as Czar  
Nicholas I; then, as now, Poland was an adjunct  
of Muscovy). From 1848 forward Wieniawski was  
an accredited celebrity. Nor did he go the down¬  
hill way of most prodigies-not until he had long  
since passed the Wunderkind stage, in any event.  
His parents, to their credit, did their best to  
shield him from the temporal temptations that  
came with his fabulous success: for a full dec¬  
ade after his debut Wieniawski was on public  
view for only a few months annually.  

Such a regimen hardly could have been ex¬  
pected to produce a normal personality and it  
did not, but that tells us nothing about Wien¬  
iawski the musician. Among the most celebrated  
virtuosos however none has been more highly  
esteemed by his peers. More's the pity that this  
giant one day would be reduced to utter igno¬  
miny by a single and inexplicable flawin his lofty  
character. Rather like the Sophoclean warrior  
Philoctetes, who had another kind of invincible  
bow, Wieniawski suffered from an incurable  
wound (though of psyche, not soma) that left  
him gradually more and more vulnerable to  
life's little vicissitudes. One hesitates to make  
too much of this because it does not jibe with  
everything else we know about the man. But the  
sad fact is that for most of his years Wieniawski  
(to a much greater degree than Paganini, whose  
dissipation had been undifferentiated) was hope¬  
lessly, pitifully addicted to gambling; and in the  
end it destroyed him.  

Social historians and clinicians certainly would  
not view such behavior in the same perspective.  

The extent to which this strange susceptibility  
may have been related to the decadent aristo¬  
cratic milieus in which Wieniawski moved is  


VIKTOR PIKAIZEN (violin)  


SIDE ONE (26:45)  

WIENIAWSKI: CONCERTO NO.1 IN F SHARP MINOR, Op. 14  

Band 1, I. Allegro moderate (15:28)/Band 2, II. Preghiera (Larghetto)/  

III. Rondo (Allegro giocoso) (11:12)  

MOSCOW RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA  
GENNADY ROZHDESTVENSKY cond.  

SIDE TWO (30:02)  

DVORAK: CONCERTO IN A MINOR, Op. 53  

Band 1, I. Allegro ma non troppo/ll. Adagio ma non troppo (20:34)/  

Band 2, III. Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo (9:23)  

MOSCOW PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA, DAVID OISTRAKH cond.  



clearly beyond the annotative ken, and so is ex  
post facto psychologizing. We do not even know  
when the pathology was manifest, though we do  
know that Wieniawksi's compulsion was firmly  
established when he began concertizing full¬  
time in the 1850s.  

Midway through a triumphant tour of Russia  
in 1860 he was offered—and precipitately, per¬  
haps unexpectedly, accepted-an appointment as  
private soloist to the Czar. The imperial court at  
St. Petersburg, and the Conservatory it sup¬  
ported, were to be his headquarters for the next  
dozen years. It was understood, however, that  
he would continue to fulfill frequent engage¬  
ments across Europe. Indeed he was obliged to,  
because his private daemon drove him again  
and again to the gaming tables; even with huge  
fees, his net worth steadily dwindled in direct  
inverse proportion to his growing renown.  

Determined, finally, to recoup some of his  
enormous losses, Wieniawski resigned the court  
sinecure in 1872 and set out for the United States  
to make his fortune in a joint tour with Anton  
Rubinstein. The "new world" was ripe for ar¬  
tistic invasion just then; in the same year, re¬  
member, Johann Strauss II came to Boston and  
conducted an orchestra of a thousand plus a  
chorus of twenty thousand! Predictably, Wien¬  
iawski and Rubinstein were a sensation almost  
everywhere. But after some seventy performances  
of the Kreutzer Sonata in as many cities the pia¬  
nist decided that it was time for him to go home.  
Wieniawski opted to stay; he simply hired an  
accompanist and kept pushing farther and farther  
west—all the way to California, where he was  
especially popular.  

Alas, at the last moment the American expe¬  
dition turned out to be a dismal disappointment  
to the beleaguered Wieniawski. He had made a  
tremendous amount of money, yes. But on the  
very eve of his embarkation for Europe came  
the collapse of financier Jay Cooke's shaky finan¬  
cial empire, including the institution that had re¬  
ceived Wieniawski's earnings from all over the  
United States. With his health already under¬  
mined by years of overwork (and, for that mat¬  
ter, overplay), this news not surprisingly plunged  
the virtuoso into a deep Byronic melancholy.  

Call it fate if you will, but no sooner had he  
slipped into that slough of despond when hope  
beckoned him to Brussels-whence came a cable  
from the Conservatory inviting him to succeed  
his old friend Vieuxtemps for an indefinite  
period (subject to the latter's recovering from a  
serious arm injury). Wieniawski gratefully wired  
his acceptance from New York and departed at  
once for Belgium, where he was to spend two  
years. Yet even there, with the benefit of 20/20  
hindsight, he could not refrain from throwing  
good money after bad at the roulette wheels. By  
1877 his earlier savings were exhausted, and so  
was he. A less driven man would have recog¬  
nized that his mind and body were entitled to a  
change of pace.  

Instead, having accumulated a mountain of  
new debts, he resumed concertizing as soon as  
Vieuxtemps came back. But thenceforth audi¬  
ences more often than not saw a very different  
Wieniawski. By all accounts his playing was as  
stupendous as ever-except that now he pre¬  
ferred to play sitting down rather than standing  
in the approved virtuoso manner. In short, the  
strain on Wieniawski's prematurely old heart no  
longer could be lost on anyone. The inevitable  
occurred soon enough: on the evening of No¬  
vember 11th, 1878, while performing his Second  
Concerto in Berlin, he was seized by a spasm  
and collapsed. Joachim, who happened to be in  
the house, rushed onstage and announced: "Al-  


ingenious simulation of gentle organ sonorities  
in the background. The song-form unfoldment  
is straightforward in expression and utterly sim¬  
ple - deceptively so, for the solo supplication  
asks for perfect control and absolutely pure  
tone. The closing Rondo (a loose designation in  
this instance) is a warmly tuneful and folklike  
Allegro giocoso. For much of its length this fi¬  
nale comprises a bare minimum of chordal  
punctuations over which the soloist is invited  
to revel in flexing his virtuosic muscles while  
simultaneously singing his way lightheartedly to  
the all-too-sudden peroration. The effect is ex¬  
hilarating — and in deliciously appropriate con¬  
trast to the weightier gravamen of what had  
come before.  


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though I cannot play my dear friend's wonder¬  
ful concerto [it was then still-unpublished], I  
shall play Bach's Chaconne." Which he did, and  
it is chronicled quite believably that Joachim  
gave a magnificent performance through his  
tears. For everyone in the hall it must have been  
an evening of inexpressible poignance.  

Soon afterward the discouraged, virtually de¬  
feated Wieniawski managed to make his way  
back to Russia, somehow convinced he could  
make a comeback in the land that had loved him  
most. After some months of teaching he felt  
strong enough to announce a public appearance.  
It is reported that he strode onstage to tumultu¬  
ous applause, and then began his recital with a  
masterpiece *he knew backwards: the Kreutzer  
Sonata. But in mid-performance, once again, he  
suddenly gasped for air, dropped his violin, and  
fell to the floor. It was no use. He was through.  

At that point there reentered Wieniawski's life  
a lady who is not unknown to us, but whose re¬  
lationship with this man remains a mystery even  
today; we can say with assurance only that there  
was a relationship. This was the immensely  
wealthy and worldly Nadezhda Filaretovna von  
Meek, the same benefactress whose generous  
subsidy of Tchaikovsky (whom she never met)  
has confused biographers for generations. She  
ordered Wieniawski removed to her estate, and  
thereafter he was accorded every possible care  
by the best physicians in Russia. To no avail; he  
passed away on April 12th, 1880, at the age of  
forty-four.  

Earlier in the same spring, after the concert that  
was cut short so abruptly and so tragically, the  
Baroness had received a letter from her more  
famous protege: "Your benevolence to poor,  
dying Henryk Wieniawski touches me deeply,"  
Tchaikovsky wrote; "in him we shall lose ... a  
gifted composer." It took one to know one.  

For the better part of a century Wieniawski's  
Second Concerto (in D minor, Op. 22) has been  
among the dozen or so most nearly "standard"  
examples of this genre in the international rep¬  
ertoire. The more severely conceived First Con¬  
certo in F sharp minor, Op. 14, has yet to  
achieve a comparable currency. The irony of this  
is that No. 1 demands if anything an even higher  
order of virtuoso skill because it is unashamedly  
a vehicle for the soloist, who is lightly (when at  
all) accompanied and thus totally exposed  
throughout.  

(On the other hand, to be sure, this could ex¬  
plain in part why the work has been heard only  
at irregular intervals since its premiere. The lat¬  
ter event is not documented without a modi¬  
cum of doubt, but the date and place seem to  
have been October 27th, 1853, at Leipzig.)  

The formal layout is unexceptional in the  
sense that it is generally orthodox. This descrip¬  
tion applies least to the long opening Allegro  
moderato —longer than the other two move¬  
ments combined — in which (a) everything is  
based on the first few woodwindy notes of the  
orchestral introduction, and (b) the extended  
cadenza is placed not toward the end but mid¬  
way, where it figures to some extent in the de¬  
velopment and recapitulation. In this initial  
movement especially the writing is large-scale  
and serious in tone. The violin often soars aloft  
in dazzling flights of Paganinian fancy, but these  
respites are tangential to the design; essentially  
the soloist is cast as a protagonist in the heroic  
mold, and in all the literature of the instrument  
there are few roles so challenging. The central  
Preghiera is just what that implies: a short  
"Prayer" (marked Larghetto), though earnest  
rather than impassioned, and complete with an  


Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) fiddled better than  
competently, though he was by no means a  
virtuoso violinist. In sheer proficiency he was  
more expert on the viola or the organ. And the  
instrument he mastered above all others, actu¬  
ally, was the orchestra: his series of Slavonic  
Dances , his Symphonic Variations , his Carnival  
Overture, his Scherzo capriccioso (each in its  
way), and no fewer than four of his symphonies  
have held masterwork status for some three-  
quarters of a century. So has the B minor Cello  
Concerto. But only in recent decades has the  
world "rediscovered" Dvorak's further contri¬  
butions to this genre, most notably his lone Vio¬  
lin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53 — composed in  
1879, revised in 1880, revised again in 1882, and  
given its premiere at Prague on the following  
October 14th.  

In its final form, needless to say, the Op. 53  
nowhere reveals that it had been born hard; the  
mature Dvorak was nothing if not a thorough¬  
going professional. And the most minimal expli¬  
cation will suffice for this lovely, leisurely music:  

The opening Allegro and the ensuing Adagio  
(both of them, and the finale as well, addition¬  
ally marked ma non troppo) are solidly built on  
three distinct themes each. The closing Allegro  
giocoso is a rhythmically beguiling rondo of  
fur/ant-like, c/umka-like, and otherwise folklike  
coloration which also provides more than a hint  
of homage to Brahms by way of allusion (surely  
deliberate) to the older composer's only violin  
concerto. To this might be added a perceptive  
mini-precis by the Swiss -musicologist Antoine-  
Elisee Cherbuliez: "The Czech village and the  
constructive spirit of the Beethoven sonata are  
the latent poles of Dvorak's inspiration. The  
natural musician of the people is here closely  
connected with the artist using a form of nearly  
classical severity."  

That says it all about this captivating concen¬  
trate of lyricism, except perhaps to note that  
there are no cadenzas as such - a datum worth  
mentioning, for so quintessential^ violinistic is  
this music that even the absence of such a sine  
qua non is likely to go unnoticed. And those  
righteous few who feel constrained to invoke  
tradition for tradition's sake will be much the  

poorer in this instance. K . 4 * a iro ,  

Notes by JAMES LYONS  

Editor, The American Record Guide  


Viktor Pikaizen was born in 1933 in Kiev. His re¬  
markable musical gifts were apparent at an early  
age, and he received his first instruction in vio¬  
lin from his father, Aleksander Pikaizen who was  
an outstanding teacher and musician in his own  
right. At the age of nine the young Viktor ap¬  
peared with a symphony orchestra and within  
two years, the press had broadcast his successes  
with the Kiev Philharmonic. In 1946, after con¬  
certs in Moscow, he was accepted as a student at  
the Gnesin Institute and during this time he was  
privileged to study with David Oistrakh.  

Three years later the sixteen-year-old violinist  
took part in the Jan Kubelik Violin Competition  
in Prague and was awarded the second prize.  
Upon graduation in 1951, he continued his  
studies with David Oistrakh at the Moscow Con¬  
servatory where he was working toward a de¬  
gree. He continued to win awards at internation¬  
ally-known competitions such as the 1955 Queen  
Elizabeth International Competition in Brussels  
(second prize), the 1957 Marguerite Long-Jacques  
Thibaud Competition in Paris (second prize), the  
1958 Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition (special  
honors), and the 1965 International Paganini  
Competition in Vienna (first prize).  

Of his successes in both the Soviet Union and  
abroad, David Oistrakh wrote in "Pravda":  
"Pikaizen has shown himself to be a brilliant vir¬  
tuoso, with a temperament that can only be  
called fiery."  



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