Beethoven, Tureck, Haendel 2022
This Week in Classical Music: December 12, 2022. Beethoven. Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on the 16th of December of 1770. We needed to rejoice Beethoven with performances made by two musicians whose anniversaries we additionally commemorate this week, the pianist Rosalyn Tureck and the violinist Ida Haendel, but it surely turned out to be a harder process than we anticipated. We knew that Rosalyn Tureck, who was born in Chicago on December 14th of 1914 right into a poor household of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was some of the essential interpreters of the music of Bach. A lot in order that Glenn Gould stated in an interview that Tureck was his solely affect. What we didn’t understand is how few recordings of Tureck enjoying music apart from Bach’s there are. When you take a look at Discogs, that on-line bible of obtainable recordings, you’ll discover none, although we all know that in 1936, when she made her New York orchestral début she performed Brahms’s Piano 
Concerto no. 2 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and earlier in her profession performed many concert events with a broad repertoire. All we may discover for this event was her Carnegie Corridor reside recording of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto no. 5. It was radio broadcast on March 17th of 1940. On that event, Sir John Barbirolli carried out the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Right here are the second and third actions of the Concerto (we trimmed a really lengthy ovation on the finish).
Ida Haendel was extra of a shock. We knew that Tureck specialised in Bach however we thought we’d discover many Haendel recordings of Beethoven, contemplating that his 10 violin sonatas and the concerto are a staple of live performance repertoires. That turned out tonot fairly be the case. Haendel was 14 years youthful than Tureck and likewise Jewish. She was born in Poland, however her household moved to Britain earlier than WWII. Haendel was an actual baby prodigy. In 1935, on the age of seven, she participated within the first Henryk 
Wieniawski Violin Competitors in Warsaw. It was a celebrated occasion, broadly coated by the European (and Soviet) press, and its outcomes had been shocking. The 16-year-old Ginette Neveu received the primary prize, beating the already well-known 29-year-old David Oistrakh, who took second. One other baby prodigy, the 12-year-old Boris Goldstein took a slightly disappointing fourth prize. However the best sensation was in all probability the efficiency of Ida, who took the 7th prize, forward of scores of proficient violinists. She went on to have an exquisite profession and lived to the ripe age of 91, nonetheless performing into her eighties. She made a major variety of recordings, although lots of them had been nonetheless mono. Amongst them are simply two items by Beethoven, his Violin concerto and the Violin sonata no. 8. We all know that she carried out his different sonatas in live performance, why she by no means recorded them is a thriller. Right here’s a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata no. 8 that Ida Haendel made in 1941. At the moment she was 12 years previous. Noel Mewton-Wooden, then 18, is on the piano. (Mewton-Wooden, a proficient Australian-born British pianist, had a brief life: in tragic circumstances he dedicated suicide on the age of 31.)
