Today, we talk about Ivry, my favorite violinist, still kicking around at nearly 98 and performing until just a couple years ago... I'd definitely have rather heard him live thirty or sixty years ago, but Ivry is not just a violinist, he's a personality, an interpreter whose performances involve creative artistry in its own right.
There are lots of music lovers who believe that the purpose of the performer is to create the illusion that the performer does not exist and there is no interlocutor required between the printed page and the music. Nonsense. Music does not live on a page. As Martin Buber would have put it, music on a page is a mere object, and our relationship to it is of an 'I' to an 'it', while music in the ear is of an 'I' to a 'thou', and it requires the presence of a human being to bring endow the music with life and create a worthwhile experience for the listener. There is value in self-effacement, both personally and musically, but self-effacement is no virtue when music requires the illumination of an intimate heart.
I'll post a couple videos here, but I want to start this with the Dvorak Humoresque. The only other violinist who could make it sound like this is Fritz Kreisler. That hugely intrusive, tacky slide, right near the beginning (almost exactly as Kreisler did it himself) is the difference between keeping this piece a rather trivial piece of music, and the kind of music that can draw tears even if you've lived with this piece and this recording for decades. Without it, it's utterly forgettable, just like the Dvorak Humoresque you hear again and again at student recitals.
Or listen to Ivry do the Sibelius Violin Concerto. I believe this is the greatest performance I've ever heard of this extraordinary work: Heifetz, Oistrakh, Ferras, none of them have a patch on Ivry, because Ivry does not just play the notes. He plays tensions between the notes: some people pretentiously call these tensions harmonic rhythm or long-range hearing (fernhören), but like Furtwangler and Mitropoulos and Casals and Cortot and Schnabel and Huberman and Menuhin before him, he bends the note lengths, tempos, and rhythms, even intonation, in such a way that they become tensile and organic, a breathing, dynamic experience that moves and lives. Heifetz would never besmirch a piece of music that way, and the loss was the listener's.
And finally, listen to him do the Nigun from Bloch's Baal Shem. Ivry was just another in the long long line of great Jewish violinists in the 20th century, the first to be born in Israel (Palestine at the time of course), but he is just another of those prodigies who seems to have the fiddle born in his hand. I don't know if you can ascribe qualities to their playing as a group when there are so many distinct personalities, but when you hear the intensity they expend on their bow arm and vibrato next to the golden-toned imperiousness of a violinist like Adolf Busch, you see that there clearly had to have been some unique approach which they brought to the sacred Austro-German tradition. The longer German tradition of violin playing, in some senses itself founded by Jews like Joseph Joachim and Ferdinand David, is a tradition that in some senses adapts itself for orchestral playing. Gorgeous sound, nothing too obtrusive. In today's more internationalized world, you're as likely to hear that kind of playing from a non-German like Hilary Hahn as you are from a German like Julia Fischer.
But all music, ultimately, is folk music, music by the people and for the people. And if the oral tradition is authentic, there is some sort of alchemy in which even a wrong note feels right. Whether that wrong note is a smudged run in Schnabel's Beethoven, or an out of tune clarinet in Kubelik's Mahler, or a natural horn note in Harnoncourt's Bach, or a raspy bow sound from the Takacs Quartet in Bartok, or an overemphasized characterization in Fischer-Dieskau's Schubert, or a tackily long held high note in Gigli's Verdi, or the extreme compression in the recording of a climax in Furtwangler's Bruckner, such is the inner animation, so completely is the performer's internalization, that it is in fact more exciting than it would be were the music making objectively correct. One day I'll do a list of the best records in that regard....
There is something about Gitlis playing Bloch that has that same authenticity. Isaac Stern, great as he is, doesn't have that authenticity in his more famous recording of this piece. And there's something about his which is correct and literal, and not nearly so inspiring. But when you hear Gitlis play it, it is, for whatever reason, the real thing. Even the wrong notes, and there are a couple dozen here, feel right.
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