Bartók, Brahms, Szymanowski Concertos – Szeryng

Some violinists you admire. Szeryng you trust — a different thing entirely, and rarer.

This new Rhine Classics set, drawn from broadcast tapes made between 1962 and 1967, will not upend anyone’s sense of who Henryk Szeryng was, but it deepens it, fills in the grain of a career that record collectors thought they already knew cold. Szeryng recorded for Mercury, for Philips, for DG — a substantial legacy, polished to a high sheen, sometimes too high for tastes that prize a little dirt under the fingernails. These live tapes have dirt under the fingernails. That’s the point of them.

The Bartók Second Concerto, taped in June 1962 with the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest under Willem van Otterloo, is the real find here, and I’ll say plainly: it belongs among the handful of great recorded accounts of this score, alongside Menuhin’s pioneering version with the composer looking over his shoulder (figuratively — Bartók had died in 1945, but the ghost was there) and Szeryng’s own studio remake years later. What strikes you first is the tone, dark and sinewy, almost baritonal in the lower register, with none of the perfumed sweetness that lesser violinists bring to this music out of nervousness, as if apologizing for Bartók’s harmonic astringency. Szeryng doesn’t apologize for anything. The first movement’s twelve-tone-adjacent second theme emerges with real bite, and the variations of the finale have a rhythmic snap that keeps the architecture visible even as the material grows thorny. But it’s the slow movement — theme and six variations, gossamer-scored — where this interpretation earns its place in the pantheon. Szeryng spins the opening melody with a kind of hushed, moonlit concentration; you can almost hear the hall holding its breath. Van Otterloo matches him shading for shading. The tape hiss is a small price.

The Geneva concert from October 1963, with Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande band, is a mixed bag, and I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. The Bach A minor concerto simply sits there — Ansermet, never a natural Bach director even in his prime, drags the outer movements into something closer to Elgar than Leipzig, all weight and no lift. Szeryng, to his credit, tries to inject some Baroque buoyancy into the solo line, but he’s rowing against the current. Only the central Andante breathes properly; his tone there has an inward, singing quality that momentarily makes you forget the plodding frame around it.

The Szymanowski redeems the disc’s Geneva half entirely. Written for Paul Kochański — who gave the premiere in Warsaw in October 1933 and left his own first-movement cadenza as a kind of fingerprint on the score — the Second Concerto is knottier, more sun-bleached and folk-inflected than its predecessor. Szeryng plays Kochański’s cadenza here, as he customarily did, and it suits him: virtuosic without vanity, idiomatic in a way that feels inherited rather than studied. Ansermet, so at sea in Bach, is completely at home in this repertoire, and the results have exactly the harmonic haze and rhythmic freedom the Bach lacked.

The rest of the set — Benjamin Lees’s Violin Concerto with Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony, and Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major with Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Vienna Symphony — I have not space here to treat with the detail they deserve, though the Lees is a genuine discovery: Szeryng digs into the astringent, Bergian lyricism of the piece with evident conviction. The Brahms, inevitably, invites comparison with Szeryng’s own later Chicago account with Dorati, or further back to Busch, to Milstein, and doesn’t quite unseat them, though Sawallisch’s Viennese woodwinds have an autumnal glow that’s lovely on its own terms.

Sound throughout is broadcast-tape variable — boxy in Geneva, more spacious in the Netherlands — and nobody should buy this expecting audiophile polish. Buy it anyway. The Bartók alone justifies the price of admission, and Szeryng’s admirers, myself very much included, will find here a violinist rediscovering, night after night, exactly why he never needed the studio’s forgiving retakes to sound this authoritative.