西貝流士 Sibelius

[Patrick]

標　　題：Sibelius's violin muses（轉貼）
發 表 人：blue97(blue97.tw)
發表時間：2001/12/03 17:59:33

轉貼一篇CRC雜誌的文章，很值得一看：

Jean Sibelius loved women but he was a very masculine composer, rather in the way that Haydn and Beethoven were. All the same, women have almost cornered the market in two areas of his music, the Violin Concerto and the songs. Why the Concerto should be so susceptible to female performers I have no idea; but the majority of its successful interpreters have been women. There may be a parallel with the equally taxing Brahms Violin Concerto, which was shunned by a number of men at the beginning but championed by female pupils of Joachim such as Marie Soldat and Leonora Jackson. Later Gioconda de Vito, Ginette Neveu and Ida Haendel made it one of their warhorses.

[Patrick]

標　　題：Sibelius's violin muses-2（轉貼）
發 表 人：blue97(blue97.tw)
發表時間：2001/12/03 18:00:14

The Sibelius Concerto is rather like the Tchaikovsky, in that the strongest movement is the first, the slow movement is a little less interesting and the finale is musically the weakest – in the case of the Sibelius, this weakness is partly due to the composer's pathologically self-critical nature, as in his 1905 revision he suppressed material which would have made the finale more varied. The work's recording history is strange. The doughty American violinist Maud Powell (1868-1920) introduced it to the US in 1906 and played it a good deal, but died just when she might have been expected to make major concerto records. No one even contemplated taking the Sibelius into the studio in the 1920s. Its dedicatee Franz von Vecsey might well have recorded it in the 1930s but died suddenly, early in 1935, when he had only recently started making records again after a long gap. In March 1932 Fred Gaisberg of HMV offered it to Adolf Busch but the violinist's secretary replied that he was 'not a friend of this composer'. As it was, the work was first attempted in the studio in Philadelphia in December 1934, by Jascha Heifetz and Leopold Stokowski, but the discs were suppressed and issued only recently. A publishable performance was finally achieved in London by Heifetz and Sir Thomas Beecham, some ten months after Vecsey's death; the soloist played well – even if his reading supported Adolf Busch's remark that everything Heifetz played came out sounding like Glazunov – but Beecham's direction missed the score's depth, both sonically and interpretatively. Then came a little flurry of four recordings by women and in all, five of the initial eight versions were contributed by the distaff side.

[Patrick]

標　　題：Sibelius's violin muses-3（轉貼）
發 表 人：blue97(blue97.tw)
發表時間：2001/12/03 18:00:44

The first had as its soloist Guila Bustabo, who was born in Wisconsin in 1917 of an Italian father and a Czech mother. She started playing the violin at three and two years later was enrolled in the Chicago Musical College, to study with the Ysaÿe pupil Léon Sametini. In 1929 she played Wieniawski's F sharp minor Concerto in New York and after further studies with Louis Persinger and many successes she was presented with a Guarneri del Gesù violin chosen for her by Kreisler. She attended Hubay and Enescu master classes and created a sensation in Europe, but was ill advised by her formidable mother, who went everywhere with her. Bustabo became involved with the composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, spent the war in North Italy and played in the occupied countries. After the war no American orchestra would have anything to do with her and her international career fizzled out; she returned to the US in the early 1970s and was last heard of playing in the orchestra in Birmingham, Alabama.

[Patrick]

標　　題：Sibelius's violin muses-4（轉貼）
發 表 人：blue97(blue97.tw)
發表時間：2001/12/03 18:01:30

One-woman duet
Bustabo was 20 when she learnt the Concerto and had been severely ill for six weeks when she played it to Sibelius at Ainola, his Järvenpää villa, in November 1937, singing the accompaniment in her excellent soprano voice. 'I noted that Maestro Sibelius's eyes were welling up with tears and, by the time I finished the first movement, he was weeping uncontrollably,' she told Dr Ralph L. Tieszen. 'Upon finishing the first movement, I was worried that I had done something wrong; but as soon as I finished, he told me that I had played it exactly as he had "envisioned it when he had composed it". I then played the second and third movements, again singing the accompaniment, and he was profoundly touched by the performance. Maestro Sibelius embraced me before we left and kissed me on both sides of my face.' The composer listened to the broadcast of her Helsinki performance and sent her a tub of two dozen roses; he also commissioned a portrait of her from the painter Wettenhovi-Aspa and hung it up in his house. In 1955 he requested that she return to Finland to play the Concerto – which she did, in 1956. She also went back to perform it in 1961, by which time Sibelius was dead.

[Patrick]

標　　題：Sibelius's violin muses-5（轉貼）
發 表 人：blue97(blue97.tw)
發表時間：2001/12/03 18:02:10

Her recording, arranged at Sibelius's express request and made in Berlin in 1940 with the orchestra of the Städtische Oper under the Cologne-born maestro Fritz Zaun, is immensely exciting, especially when you hear it for the first time or after a long interval; but the law of diminishing returns operates: the more Bustabo sets every note aquiver with emotion, the less I find myself being drawn into the performance. Her other records show that she tended to go at the music like a bull at a gate and I am not sure her interpretation was really what Sibelius wanted, in his heart of hearts. Like a lot of composers, he tended to praise everyone who played his music; and he was susceptible to a pretty face. But readers can make up their own minds, as the performance has long been available on CD, albeit in a rather ordinary transfer (A Classical Record CD 37-1/2).