Matthew T Grant

I just got back from the symphony whereat I heard Joshua Bell play Brahms’ Violin Concerto.

Though I’ve always been a rock guy (the first album I ever bought was KISS Destroyer, and, indeed as I write this, I’m listening to Jimmy Page live with the Yardbirds from 1968), I have been “into” classical music, which my mother referred to as “long hair” music, off and on since I was a kid and, as it turns out, actually listened to that concerto fairly frequently at one point.

Why was I listening to it then? Because I had become obsessed with a violinist, Henryk Szeryng,  and, having sought out his recordings, one day lit upon his interpretation of Brahms’ masterwork done for Mercury’s Living Presence imprint in 1962.

How had I become obsessed with Szeryng? I went up to Canada in December 1993 to attend the MLA Convention in Toronto and was staying near Georgetown, Ontario with the family of a Canadian acquaintance.  We were hanging out with his next door neighbor’s grandson, David, who played viola in the string quartet at Indiana University South Bend (I believe this is David today), and that guy put on Szeryng’s recording of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin.

I had never heard these compositions before nor had I heard a violinist like Szeryng, whose tone was exotically rough hewn and absolutely entrancing. I felt drawn into the sonatas, invited to inhabit them. When David mentioned that Szeryng had been a morphine addict, I was hooked.

I had never really thought of classical musicians as characters, let alone madmen and junkies. This was my mistake. Although others who knew him later confirmed to me that Szeryng could in fact play beautifully even when exquisitely wasted, I soon discovered that beyond that he had led an incredibly colorful life which included, among other things, emigrating to Mexico with a host of Poles fleeing the Nazis and eventually becoming a Mexican citizen out of gratitude to the nation which had so graciously welcomed him and his compatriots.

Long story short, I heard exceeding virtuosity in Joshua Bell’s performance – that young man sure can play the fiddle – but I did not hear anything ragged or wild in it. And I missed that.

Image Courtesy of mint imperial.