GREAT RECORDINGS phase 16

KHACHATURIAN: VIOLIN CONCERTO
*TANEYEV · SUITE DE CONCERT
David Oistrakh
Philharmonia Orchestra
Aram Khachaturian · *Nicolai Malko

3 61570 2 (Angel: 3 4571 2)
Recorded: 1954 & *1956
Mono/*Stereo/ADD
79 minutes

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‘Oistrakh plays the Violin Concerto written for him by Khachaturian with effortless virtuosity in the outer movements and his handling of the central Andante is particularly expressive and eloquent. The superb Philharmonia responds to the composer’s effective conducting with obvious enthusiasm.’ (The Gramophone)
Diapason d’Or, France

The first appearance on CD of this classic recording of Khachaturian’s popular Violin Concerto was in the early 1990s, when it was coupled with other orchestral works from the same November 1954 sessions in Kingsway Hall, London, at which the composer conducted his own music with Walter Legge’s superb Philharmonia Orchestra. Oistrakh was on his first visit to Britain.

The Concerto was written for Oistrakh in 1940 and the violinist contributed his own cadenza to a work which he made famous and which he often played, as here, with the composer himself conducting. The coupling for this reissue of the Khachaturian is another work Oistrakh made very much his own and another classic recording.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the composer, pianist and teacher Sergei Taneyev, an influential figure in late 19th and early 20th-century Russian music whose attractive Suite for violin and orchestra was written for the great Hungarian violinist Leopold Auer in 1908–9. Oistrakh relishes the challenges thrown up by this large-scale sequence of genre pieces and the recording, made during the violinist’s second British tour, is conducted by Nicolai Malko, who gave Oistrakh his first big break, in Leningrad in 1928.