This is the companion to Dutton CDBP 9804, which has concertos
by Bruch, Spohr and Mozart. Both discs display Kulenkampff’s
very considerable strengths, allied to which he was an eminently
reliable artist and seldom had an off-day in the studio. This
offering includes the 1935 Mendelssohn Concerto - an ‘export
only’ affair for obvious reasons, and one that displayed
a suitably mercenary side to the Nazi artistic machinery. We
also have the Tchaikovsky - in these circumstances one could
almost venture a proto-political reason for its having being
recorded in 1939, as one assuredly could when Talich and the
Czech Philharmonic were forced to record the same work with
Wolfgang Schneiderhan, after the fall of Czechoslovakia.
The Mendelssohn Concerto on disc was then dominated by Kreisler
and Szigeti. Leaving to one side the rather unpleasant political
ramifications of the Berlin recording, this particular addition,
whilst hardly in that class of personalisation, is still a valuable
inscription, capturing Kulenkampff in the classical milieu in
which he flourished. His Spohr was equally excellent - and can
be found on the companion Dutton disc - and so it would be fair
to note him as a wholly responsive and intelligent exponent
of the concerto. One might query the ‘rough sea’
voyage that Schmidt-Isserstedt directs in the central movement
- not joined to the first by the way in this transfer - but
in compensation there are some marvellously vivid basses and
one can hear the soloist in his accompanying figures in places
where, at the time, one usually couldn’t hear a soloist
unless he was directly under the microphone.
The Tchaikovsky should have suited Kulenkampff, who always had
a Slavic inclination - he essayed the Glazunov excellently,
for instance, and his way with the more northerly Sibelius is
well known. The introduction, eked out by a lugubrious Artur
Rother and his Berlin Deutsches Opernhaus Orchestra, prefigures
an unusually ugly slide from the soloist (it’s at 1:17)
and altogether this is rather a sentimentalised approach, with
Kulenkampff playing the coquette before the tuttis in a rather
fanciful way. The orchestra responds with military medium strict
rhythm. The slow movement is salon-ised, and becomes an avuncular
lied, whilst interest in the finale (with the usual cuts) is
reserved for some interesting phrasal variants from Kulenkampff.
This is an interesting, unusual reading, and peripheral for
most people, I suspect, but very valuable to admirers of the
soloist or the circumstances. The transfer on LYS097 wasn’t
especially good and this Dutton presents a stronger approach
though one with a rather generic string sound - hemmed in and
rather airless in house style. The Mendelssohn is also on Opus
Kura [OPK2092]. The two makeweights are orchestrally-accompanied
and enjoyably unsugary. I was expecting the worst, but should
have trusted the soloist.
Jonathan Woolf
Georg Kulenkampff (violin) 
