Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky Violin Concertos – Taschner

Some names get swallowed by history for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. Gerhard Taschner is a case in point: a violinist so fastidious about live performance, so wary of the recording studio, that he all but vanished from the record the moment his generation began filling catalogs with their names. Heifetz recorded everything, repeatedly. Taschner played concerts. He is remembered, when remembered at all, in murmurs.

Furtwängler brought him into the Berlin Philharmonic as concertmaster in 1942, barely out of adolescence, fresh from his studies with Hubay and Huberman. This reissue, gathering his Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky concertos alongside the inevitable Sarasate encore, lets us hear why.

The Mendelssohn, taped with Fritz Lehmann and the Bamberg orchestra, is the stronger document by some distance. Taschner’s instincts here are songful: he wants the E minor concerto to sing rather than dazzle, and mostly he gets his way. Tempi breathe naturally, without the metronomic anxiety some soloists bring to the first movement’s passagework. There’s sweetness in the slow movement, though also a mannerism that dates the performance rather charmingly: those downward portamento slides, unfashionable even by the 1950s, surely inherited from Huberman’s old-world bow arm. Some listeners will wince. I found myself charmed, the way one is charmed by a sepia photograph — you accept the tint as part of the picture. The finale’s spiccato is where the artistry really shows itself: light, precise, needle-sharp, no scrambling.

Intonation drifts sharp now and then. Small thing. Doesn’t sink the performance.

The Tchaikovsky is a rougher road. Arthur Rother’s conducting with the Berlin Philharmonic is competent, foursquare, oddly incurious, and it doesn’t lift Taschner the way a great collaborator can lift a soloist. Rother just drives. Taschner’s playing is honest and technically assured, the passagework in the first movement clean, the harmonics true, but he doesn’t have the burnished, almost vocal tone Oistrakh brought to this music, or the combustible bravura Heifetz unleashed in his RCA recordings. The slow movement’s canzonetta wants a darker, more velvety color than Taschner’s leaner sound can supply. By the finale, the Zigeunerweisen mode ought to have taken hold, but the reading stays curiously buttoned-up, well-mannered where it should let its hair down.

Which brings us to the Sarasate itself, “Gipsy Airs,” recorded with pianist Michael Raucheisen rather than orchestra. Unbuttoned at last, Taschner is terrific. The lassan section is dusky and improvisatory, the final csárdás genuinely reckless. Eight minutes of a violinist cutting loose, and you understand why his contemporaries spoke of him with such respect. This is a player who lived for the platform, for the unrepeatable moment, which is exactly the temperament that kept him out of the release studios and, eventually, out of memory.

Sound quality throughout is decent mono-into-early-stereo transfer work, a bit dry in climaxes, with occasional pre-echo on the Tchaikovsky that dates it unmistakably as tape rather than disc. Nothing disqualifying.

He died young, in 1976, having spent his last years teaching rather than touring, and the LP era simply moved past him. Labels like Tahra and Archipel deserve credit for digging him back out. This disc won’t displace Heifetz or Oistrakh in anyone’s core Tchaikovsky collection, and it won’t unseat Milstein in the Mendelssohn. But as a portrait of a genuinely gifted violinist working in the shadow of giants, it is worth hearing, worth remembering.