A brace of new releases from Living Era gives us Twenty Great Violinists and Twenty Great Pianists (see review). Both have a similar rationale. Neither seeks to claim the “twenty greatest,” an invariably fatuous endeavour, so there is no implied equivalence between the players. And this means that your own particular missing favourite – Thibaud, say, or Toscha Seidel – need not feel slighted.
 
There are a number of such compilations on the market – Pearl has an encore selection for instance – and they stand or fall on several grounds. Firstly how good is the selection? Well, the expected names are here. Kreisler has his Caprice Viennois but in the 1926 recording not the better known one from a decade later. Elman and Heifetz and the Milsteins and Morinis are all here. Perhaps less expectedly Spalding is here - his Cassadó piece has never been released on CD so far as I’m aware, only on a Masters of the Bow LP many years ago. Its appearance here is a mark of acute and knowledgeable selection. Similarly the 1941 Busch Geminiani, seldom encountered, and the Kulenkampff Humoresque, taken from a 1928 session. It’s also fine to have Odnoposoff in this company even if he is represented by that classic piece of violinistic flim-flam, the Perpetuum mobile. In this selection Zimbalist’s Drigo also sits well, another escapee from most CD reissues.
 
In this respect though doubts begin to intrude over some of the selections. In this overwhelmingly encore orientated disc we have Ricci’s Tzigane with Lamoureux Orchestra and Eugene Bigot. And we also have the finale of the Kreutzer with Kogan and Ginzburg. Both these are welcome but not, I think, here. They unbalance the programme. The Kogan would be far better off heard in its entirety elsewhere and we could have thus increased the number of fiddlers included in this album. 
 
The second consideration is documentation. The Living Era team has gone to some lengths to compile useful discographic information – full titles, opus numbers and dates of composition, full matrix and issue numbers. Several specialist reissue outfits would do well to emulate them. That said a few typos have intruded. Haendel’s accompanist Adela Kotowska has her name misspelled; the compilers can’t agree either on who wrote the Perpetuum mobile – Novacek obviously not Novak – or on Emanuel Bay’s surname (Bay not Bey). Overall however this level of care has not gone unnoticed – a budget price product need not always mean budget price documentation, as this company consistently shows.
 
The final question is transfer quality and this is where Living Era and I must regretfully part company. If you go to the trouble of excavating Elman’s 1917 Drigo why turn it into the kind of aural mush that makes it sound as if it were recorded on tinfoil in 1887? It’s heard on an immeasurably better transfer in Biddulph’s Elman edition where that volcanic tone is intact. The same strictures apply throughout. Huberman’s spiky spiccati are homogenised out of existence – hear him once again on Biddulph. Szigeti’s 1941 disc sounds almost brutally aggressive – nothing so brittle happens in the relevant Szigeti volume, once again, on Biddulph. Similarly the Haendel sounds superior on the Decca reissue, the Menuhin on Biddulph; the Kreisler sounds especially poor here and the Kulenkampff Polydor has no room ambience. The 78 sounds much more open and warm.
 
In short the personalised tones and aural characteristics that make these players so special have been compromised by the transfers. As such newcomers will be wise to regard this release with considerable caution.
 
Jonathan Woolf
 

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