This cannily selected trio of commercial recordings will be
familiar to Heifetz admirers, but nevertheless makes for a winning
Gallic triptych. The Fauré sonata is the only pre-war inscription,
recorded with Emanuel Bay in 1936 and chosen in preference to
the 1955 remake with Brooks Smith, which would have been, in
the circumstances, the more obvious choice given the other two
recordings date from 1950.
Heifetz was a bold, masculine Fauré player. His characteristic
‘Heifetz slides’ impart a memorable litheness and a slashing
vitality to the sonata, both coaxing and illuminating. Whilst
the ethos is hardly Gallic in orientation it is still fervid
and rhythmically charged, his hooded, cloaked tonal resources
at their apogee in the Andante inevitably. The sound level steps
up a gear in the Scherzo, which is a touch disconcerting, though
here the recording exacerbates a rather prominent steely sound
as enshrined by the studio set up. Bay is, as so often, too
much the horse and Heifetz too much the rider when it comes
to the balance, which places the pianist at a significant aural
remove. Heifetz is, on the whole, preferable to his Russian
colleague Elman in this work but obviously Thibaud/Cortot is
the first port of call for recordings of this vintage, followed
by Francescatti/Casadesus and then Soriano/Tagliaferro. We lack
a Dubois/Maas traversal, regrettably. As for the transfer it
has tamed treble at the expense of room ambience and Jon Samuel’s
work for Biddulph [LAB065, coupled with Grieg No.2] back in
1992 is still a viable alternative, and is preferable to the
XR treatment on Pristine Audio PACM026.
The 1950 recordings show Heifetz at his mature peak. He only
left behind one studio recording of the Debussy which he set
down a few years after Francescatti and Casadesus’s famed US
Columbia traversal of April 1946. Heifetz plays with sovereign
command, of course, but occasionally distends phrases, milking
them, and thereby loses impetus – not something that could very
often be said of him. The most over-interventionist playing
is in the first movement but one finds that, despite this being
a powerful musical statement, and despite his playing and editing
of Debussy miniatures the Sonata’s ethos was a little beyond
him, certainly if one judges him against Thibaud or Dubois or
Francescatti. By contrast he commands the resinous and athletic
surety for the Saint-Saëns, a work to which he was to return
in 1967 with Brooks Smith. Here he is monarchical in his digital
control, expressive in the slow movement, and brilliant in the
bowing and co-ordination challenges of the finale (I’ve seen
a couple of violinists drop their bows in concert trying to
dispatch this). The recording catches the abrasive quality of
the music making, but some treble taming helps.
Jonathan Woolf
Jascha Heifetz (violin) 
