Credits:

Bronislav Gimpel

Description:

From "Biddulph on Strings" comes a collection of concertos by Bronislaw Gimpel. The Tchaikovsky in stereo is particularly noteworthy. Bronislaw Gimpel was born in 1911 in Lemberg (now Lviv in western Ukraine) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a musical family of Polish-Jewish descent. His father was a theater conductor and once played clarinet under the direction of Gustav Mahler. When his father began teaching piano and violin to the 5-year-old Bronislaw, he made remarkable progress, and at the age of 8 he entered the local conservatory, where he played the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto that same year; at the age of 11 he moved to the Vienna Academy of Music, where he played the Goltmarck Violin Concerto at 14. At the age of 15, he was invited to Italy with his brother Jacob, a pianist, to perform in Genoa at Paganini's Gwarneri del Gesù, and in Rome before the King of Italy and the Pope. In 1928, Gimpel entered Carl Flesch's class in Berlin, and after a year of study, on Flesch's advice, he became concertmaster of the broadcast orchestra in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), which was conducted by Hermann Scherchen.After playing with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, he was invited by Klemperer to serve as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's conductor, and when World War II broke out, he played in orchestras belonging to the U.S. Air Force. After the war, he played with the orchestra of the American broadcaster ABC and with his own string quartet, etc. In 1950, after a very successful debut in London, he resumed his activities in Europe, giving numerous performances mainly in the U.K. and Germany. In 1962, he visited Warsaw and met his old friend Władysław Spielmann (the main character in the movie "The Pianist of the Battlefield"), and they hit it off well, forming a duo and a piano quintet that toured and recorded concerts. According to the original disc description, the five pieces included here are the first time they have been released on CD. The combination of low noise and sound freshness suggests that the conditions of the reissued material were good. In Beethoven, the depth of sound can be felt even though it is in mono. The small cadenza connecting the second and third movements is a tribute to Flesch. The Tchaikovsky is the only stereo recording in this set. The violin Gimpel plays here was used by Iosif Kotek, a violinist who advised the composer when he was working on this piece, and Gimpel boasted that it was the same sound that Tchaikovsky heard.His playing is lucid and powerful throughout the five pieces, which can be described as crisp, propulsive, block-letter music. The booklet includes a seven-page commentary (English only) by Tully Potter, an expert on the historical violinist's playing, as well as rare photos of the 15-year-old Gimpel and a two-shot with Hindemith taken in 1955. Naxos Japan