replay

Robert Cowan makes his pick of the latest reissues

Schubert: Die schone Mullerin

Aksel Schiotz, Gerald Moore

(Recorded: 1945)

(Preiser / Harmonica Mundi 90293)

Schubert's "roving miller" as personified with a candour, intelligence and beauty of tone that only Aksel Schiotz himself equalled - or, rather, "anticipated", in a series of warm-up recordings made in Denmark during the early days of the Second World War. To hear him sing "O Bachlein meiner Liebe..." (Der Neugierige) or "In Grun will ich mich kleiden..." (Die liebe Farbe) should be enough to dethrone most rivals, even through quietly sizzling surfaces and tubby sound.

Schiotz was born in Copenhagen in 1906, sang the popular songs of the day (he cut an astonishingly beautiful 78 of Cole Porter's "Night and Day") and made his debut as a concert tenor in 1938. He refused to sing in public during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, toured Scandinavia and England after the war and created - with Peter Pears - the Male Chorus in Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. Schiotz's honeyed tenor and lyrical phrasing suggest a youthful idealism parallel to the Miller's own; he can be excitable, soulful, bold or melancholy, all within the framework of immaculate artistry and an acute sensitivity to words. Gerald Moore provides a good accompaniment, although later collaborations (most notably with Fischer-Dieskau) found him gaining in subtlety.

Julian Sitkovetsky (father of Dmitry) was everything you'd expect of a young virtuoso; confident, spontaneous, intuitively musical and with his own very personal tone quality. Less predictable was his tragically early death from cancer in 1958. He was just 33 years old and yet his little-known discography includes many gems (there's a stunning Khachaturian Concerto on Russian Disc), not least this 1953 Sibelius Violin Concerto conducted by Nikolai Anosov (father of Gennady Rozhdestvensky) - a robust, outgoing account, tonally alluring and just occasionally slipping from the note's centre.

David Oistrakh was, of course, a very different proposition, though he greatly admired Sitkovetsky and supported him financially during his final illness. Oistrakh's virtues were poise, warmth and a self-effacing virtuosity that inspired listeners to focus away from the music's surface to what lay between or behind the notes. Beethoven's F minor Romance provides a modest sampling of his natural repose and considered phrasing, whereas Leonid Kogan favoured a more overt manner of expression, and never more so than in the frantic cadenza that links the last two movements of Shostakovich's magnificent First Violin Concerto. It's a diverting display, though Oistrakh - the Concerto's dedicatee and finest interpreter - habitually gave us guns rather than fireworks.

Giants of the Violin

Julian Sitkovetsky, David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan

play concertos by Sibelius, Beethoven and Shostakovich

(Recorded: 1953-1964)

(Supraphon / Koch SU 3005-2 001)