PROKOFIEV Violin Concertos 1 & 2, Violin Sonata No. 2

Milstein combines Szigeti’s mordant wit and Oistrakh’s haunting lyricism with a fierceness all his own, while remaining his aristocratic and commanding self throughout.

"The recorded sound of these collected recordings varies somewhat, as, of course, do the accompaniments, but Milstein appears his aristocratic and commanding self throughout. For those who want to hear him in this repertoire, a sort of specialty, this should be the best way to do it: no assembly required. Urgently recommended, as everything Milstein did can—and must—be." --Robert Maxham, FANFARE [1/2006]

Nathan Milstein must be mentioned along with David Oistrakh and Joseph Szigeti as a premier exegete of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto. But unlike Szigeti, Milstein also played the Second Concerto (just as, unlike Heifetz, he also played the First). Still, he had a decided preference: Tully Potter cites Milstein’s remarks (from his autobiography) about Prokofiev, designating the First Concerto as a work of genius and the second as a product of craftsmanship. David Oistrakh had popularized the brief sweet and sour First Concerto in the Soviet Union (where it remained more popular than the Second), and Joseph Szigeti did the same in the West. But Milstein, who recorded it twice in the studio (the first time with Vladimir Golschmann and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1954) combined Szigeti’s mordant wit and Oistrakh’s haunting lyricism. 

The second recording, from 1962, combines the virtues of the other two violinists with a fierceness almost innate to Milstein, an iconoclast like Prokofiev himself. For example, Milstein could challenge Oistrakh in the work, bringing the first and third movements to a transcendent close after slashing passagework that emphasizes just how terrible the enfant Prokofiev must have seemed to his contemporaries. Giulini—and the engineers—reveal sparkling—and essential—orchestral detail in all three movements. Yet detail never constitutes the raison d’être of Milstein’s performances, as it seems to do in the cases of many younger violinists (and conductors): Milstein focuses on the forest, extracting the maximum voltage from the music in the process. Milstein recorded Prokofiev’s Second Concerto in 1965, when he had already reached his sixties. 

The collaboration with Frühbeck de Burgos, with whom he had made his third studio recordings of Glazunov’s and Dvo?ák’s concertos, resulted in a reading that’s more muscular than Heifetz’s; and although the second movement starts out with similar intensity, a greater sense of deliberation keeps it from soaring in quite the same way (although its climax packs an even more powerful dramatic punch). The last movement, again heavier in concept and execution than Heifetz’s, lacks that performance’s crackling static electricity—due in part, at least, to Frühbeck de Burgos’s massive and determined accompaniment. Milstein’s recording of Prokofiev’s Second Sonata (he didn’t record the First) emphasizes the first movement’s classical, almost Handelian, smoothness. And while some might suggest that Milstein could slither more suggestively in the slow movement, he’s pure quicksilver in the Scherzo. EMI reissued this Sonata earlier, re-mastered “from original session tapes,” on CDM 67316, 24:2, a re-release that I nominated for the Want List the same month. The recorded sound, from 1955, holds up very well in this re-mastering; and the performance with Artur Balsam, who accompanied so many great violinists, still packs a punch, especially in the finale, which Milstein transforms into a tour de force (Oistrakh seemed to stay closer in spirit to the sonata’s original conception as a work for flute—the closeness may have resulted in early familiarity with the flute version, which prompted him to commission the transcription).

The recorded sound of these collected recordings varies somewhat, as, of course, do the accompaniments, but Milstein appears his aristocratic and commanding self throughout. For those who want to hear him in this repertoire, a sort of specialty, this should be the best way to do it: no assembly required. Urgently recommended, as everything Milstein did can—and must—be.

-- Robert Maxham, FANFARE [1/2006]