2023-11-07 17:00:05
Image taken from Bruno Monsaingeon’s documentary, “David Oïstrakh, artist of the people? » (1994). EUROARTS
MEZZO – TUESDAY NOVEMBER 7 AT 6 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY
Made in 1994, Bruno Monsaingeon’s film dedicated to the violinist David Oïstrakh (1908-1974) draws on archival documents whose rarity dictates the price. In opening, More than slow, by Claude Debussy, waltz composed in 1910 and captured here in Moscow in 1936 in a scenography modern style ; the Henryk-Wieniawski competitions, in Warsaw in 1935, and Ysaÿe, in Brussels in 1937, which will reveal David Fiodorovitch Oistrakh, native of Odessa (Ukraine). But also the Concerto (1845) by Felix Mendelssohn, which he imposed in Berlin in 1939, or the concert under the bombs in 1943 in Leningrad (the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia), then besieged.
Read the archive (1996): Article reserved for our subscribers DAVID OISTRAKH
Let us cite further sequences from Concerto for two violins (1731) by Johann Sebastian Bach in Brussels, with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1958, from Double concerto (1887) by Johannes Brahms in London in 1965, with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch, of the Concert Symphony (1770s) by Mozart, with his son Igor Oïstrakh (1931-2021), concertos by Tchaikovsky, Jean Sibelius, Dmitri Shostakovich…
” I had the chancesaid the violinist, that great composers write for me: Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev and Shostakovich, who dedicated his second concerto to me for my sixtieth birthday. He was hospitalized the evening of the premiere and he followed it on the radio. » We can even hear the composer’s voice on the phone: “ Your interpretation is magnificent, it’s as if I had played it myself”the author of the Symphony “Leningrad” (1941) and opera Lady Macbeth de Mzensk (1932), banned at the time by Joseph Stalin.
Without losing your soul
Testimonies and interviews with long-time friends and fellow musicians – that of Menuhin is particularly touching – complete the portrait painted by Bruno Monsaingeon, himself a former violinist, in an attempt to understand how the great virtuoso was able to serve Soviet propaganda without losing your soul. Rostropovich rightly mentions Oistrakh’s relations with the regime. Former conductor of the Moscow Radio Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018) tells how he conducted all the major concertos for him.
Read the archive (2001): Article reserved for our subscribers THE ART OF DAVID AND IGOR OÏSTRAKH Violin concertos by Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart and Wieniawski Violin romances by Beethoven
The Latvian violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer, for his part, recalls the professor David Oïstrakh. Touching, too, the testimony of Igor Oïstrakh, who joined his father’s violin class alongside Gidon Kremer, and in turn became a renowned violinist, named “People’s Artist of Russia” in 1989 before ending his career as a teacher at the Brussels Conservatory, between 1996 and 2010.
“No matter how much I search in my memory, I cannot see myself in childhood without a violinsays David Oïstrakh in the documentary. I was 3 1/2 years old when my father brought me a toy violin. While playing it, I imagined that I was a street violinist, a sad profession very common at that time in Odessa. But, for me, there could be no greater happiness. »
Gennady Rozhdestvensky has a phrase in the form of an epitaph: “ If he had not been silent, if he had spoken loud and clear, we would never have heard the sound of his violin.
David Oïstrakh, artist of the people?documentary portrait by Bruno Monsaingeon (Fr.-All., 1994, 75 min).
#inspired #violinist #forced #silence