The Fifth Element

I have to eat crow. I must retract a Record to Die For I handed out this time last year. [sigh] This has never happened before.

The pick in question is the recording, "remastered at Abbey Road" and bound as a book, of David Oistrakh playing the Brahms Violin Concerto and Double Concerto and Beethoven's Triple Concerto, with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, pianist Sviatoslav Richter, George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra (Brahms), and Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic (Beethoven) (2 SACD/CDs, EMI Signature Collection 9 55978 2).

Why take back an R2D4? I will explain. First, some necessary background:

I think the informed consensus is nearly universal that, had Iosef "Jascha" Ruvinovich Heifetz (1901–1987, though he may have been born in 1899) never appeared on the scene, David Fyodorovich Oistrakh (1908–1974; né Kolker, he early adopted his stepfather's surname) would have been considered the greatest violinist of the 20th century.

Without doubt, Heifetz brought unprecedented technical facility to bear on major works that previously had not been fully realized in concert performances, most notably the concertos of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, and Chausson's Poäme for violin and orchestra. That said, Heifetz's legendary "silken tone" was often at the service of interpretations that critic Virgil Thomson once called "silk-underwear music."

As time went on, Heifetz seemed to revel in playing as fast as possible for the sake of speed itself. He also was not above "improving" masterworks that perhaps he felt were not showy or violinistic enough for his agenda. An example of the latter was his adding to the violin part at the end of Franck's Sonata (in a recording with Artur Rubinstein, no less) notes that Franck never wrote—I think, in order to keep the piano from having the last musical word. Heifetz also turned the trill at the end of the Ciaccona, from J.S. Bach's Partita 2, in d, into a double trill—but perhaps that can be excused as a nod to the baroque ethos of improvised ornamentation.

My default posture re: Heifetz has always been to debunk the hype. However, I would never want to be without his (mono) recording of the Ciaccona spuriously attributed to Tommaso Antonio Vitali (1663–1745), which is one of the most thrilling of all violin recordings. I also must say that I was rather shocked at how lyrically unrushed and soulful is Heifetz's 1938 recording of the Glazunov concerto, with John Barbirolli and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I can only speculate as to why. Was Heifetz temporarily under the spell of Barbirolli's compelling musicality? Or did Heifetz think that while Americans might understand only the fast and the loud, British audiences needed to be conquered with lyricism?

Listen to the Heifetz-Barbirolli Glazunov for yourself; it's available here, or on CD (EMI 61591). It certainly doesn't sound like the Heifetz of the post-WWII RCA recordings. But please keep in mind that I am showing Heifetz in his best light with that.

I think it's fair to say that Heifetz is today remembered more as a paragon of violin technique than as a supremely important and broad-ranging interpreter. There is more to interpretation than just precision of execution. As far as I'm concerned, with Heifetz there is almost always a sense of forward propulsion, sometimes to an uncomfortable degree; with Oistrakh, there is always a sense of musical flow.

Career-wise, Heifetz had the good luck to decamp for greener pastures before the Russian Revolution, ending up in New York City. His 1917 Carnegie Hall debut, at a claimed age of 16, was legendary. Heifetz's performing career in the US was well established before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression.

In 1939, Heifetz costarred in the film They Shall Have Music, playing himself in a story about a struggling music school for the poor; it's worth seeing once. After WWII, and with the advent of the 331/3rpm LP, Heifetz was an undisputed icon of aspirational culture. Along with Einstein's, Heifetz's is one of the few surnames that have become almost common nouns, as in "He's no Heifetz." Heifetz continued to perform and record until the early 1970s; thereafter, he continued to teach for almost 15 years.

In contrast, David Oistrakh was a late bloomer, first on the viola, then the violin. He caught almost every bad career break he could—from coming in behind Ginette Neveu in the first International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition, in 1935, to being stuck in the Soviet Union through the Stalin years, WWII, and the Cold War. Oistrakh also ran the risk of being too good a friend to the politically "unreliable" Dmitri Shostakovich. Further, while Heifetz was darkly handsome (after a fashion, at least in his youth), by the time Oistrakh's fame had spread beyond the USSR's borders, he looked like a potato farmer or a Soviet bureaucrat. But the guy sure could play—and play not just the violin, but music. An iconic Oistrakh Bach performance from 1952 can be heard here.

The hallmarks of an Oistrakh performance were a warmly centered tonal beauty, unfailing accuracy of pitch, interpretive humility, understated stylistic elegance, and a nobly monumental conception of the music's architecture. American audiences did not hear him in concert until 1955, at Carnegie Hall—his debut was the climax of a day that had heard both Elman and Milstein play on the same stage. Autodidact culture vulture Marilyn Monroe was in the audience.

On his first US tour, Oistrakh recorded with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and soon recorded with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, as well as Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony. Oistrakh's recording with Mitropoulos was the first of Shostakovich's magisterial Violin Concerto 1, which was dedicated to him.

Oistrakh recorded the Brahms Violin Concerto at least four times in studio settings: with Kiril Kondrashin (Moscow, 1952), Franz Konwitschny (Dresden, 1954), Otto Klemperer (Paris, 1960), and Szell (Cleveland, 1969). (As many as 10 live recordings, in varying degrees of sound quality, have also been available over the years.) I've always thought the recording with Szell was the best of the bunch. First, it's in stereo (as is the Klemperer). Second, in 1969 the Cleveland Orchestra was at its peak under the legendary, and legendarily difficult, Szell. And while Oistrakh was then in his 61st year, his technique was still effortlessly solid. And in 1966, he had finally settled on the 1705 "Marsick" Stradivari as his ideal instrument.

Scratch One R2D4
So it seemed to me a no-brainer to name the SACD remastering of the Brahms-Oistrakh-Szell-Cleveland (BOSC) recording as one of my R2D4s for 2014 (though I knew it was from a PCM transfer, and not a direct DSD transfer). But as soon as the February 2014 issue hit the mailboxes, things began to unravel. Sharp-eyed reader and former broadcast engineer Richard Lane e-mailed to say that he'd noticed that the inside-cover log sheet of the tape box pictured in the SACD booklet (see photo) stated that the tape in that box was a replacement "Re-Mix" that was "Now the Master." Yikes!

Lane wanted to know whether that March 1973 master-tape substitution was perhaps the cause of the overloads he heard in orchestral tuttis. I had always heard the momentary overloads in the tuttis, but had assumed they were artifacts of the master tape. For me, at least, they didn't detract from the beauty of Oistrakh's tone in the solo passages, or make this bargain-priced ($20) two-SACD set, on the whole, less recommendable. But . . . hmm.

I scanned and blew up that page of the booklet, and was horrified to see a smaller notation: the tape had seemed musically sharp to one EMI engineer, with concert A at 445, not 440Hz—which therefore made the entire performance not only sharp but too fast. A directive in reply, dated 2011, stated that there were to be no speed adjustments, in that the "LP=445." Double Yikes!

That was when I began to suspect there was something not quite kosher in Denmark. My violin teacher at Brown, Professor Kowalski, once asked me to guess when A=440 had been established as the international tuning standard. I guessed the 1860s or 1880s. He replied that it had been 1936. Indeed, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) did not establish 440Hz as the international standard until 1955.

Before 1936, concert pitch was usually (but not always) A=432Hz. The notion that Oistrakh was tuning to A=445 or higher struck me as absurd. And the idea that the Cleveland Orchestra would tune to A=445 struck me as even more ridiculous, given that the Boston Symphony was always regarded as out of step with other American orchestras for tuning as high as A=442.

I consulted with classical recordist and world-class Mahlerian Jerry Bruck, who advised me to enlist the aid of the Historical Committee of the Audio Engineering Society. Tom Fine, an engineer in his own right as well as the son of C. Robert and Wilma Cozart Fine, the couple responsible for producing and engineering the Mercury Living Presence recordings, responded with an open-ended offer of help. I'll bet he had no idea how long this would drag on.

My next step was to phone the Cleveland Orchestra and speak with archivist Deborah Hefling, who promised to ask current and retired players. The answer quickly came back: The Cleveland Orchestra has always tuned to A=440. Therefore, the EMI SACD whose CD layer I had, measured as A=446.4 or 446.5Hz, using the Amadeus Pro II app, was from a "corrupt source." The result was the same with the 24-bit/96kHz hi-rez download.

Then as now, I was less concerned about the digitized tape's not being the "original master" as I was about the tonal and interpretative misrepresentation of the music resulting from its being played back faster and sharper than these musicians had performed it during the recording. On the speeded-up SACD, the first movement ends about 20 seconds faster than it must have in real life. I think that's a nontrivial musical difference.