French Violin Showpieces – Grumiaux

There used to be a kind of violinist you don’t hear anymore — one who assumed elegance was not the enemy of feeling but its precondition. Arthur Grumiaux was the last great exemplar of that assumption, and this Eloquence twofer, drawn from sessions with Manuel Rosenthal and the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureux in the mid-1960s, makes the case with a persuasiveness that some collectors will find almost old-fashioned. Almost.

Start with the Lalo, since everyone does. The Symphonie espagnole is one of those pieces that tempts fiddlers into a kind of gypsy cosplay — lots of scooping, lots of grinding double-stops, lots of Iberian sunburn applied with a trowel. Grumiaux will have none of it. His first movement is aristocratic without being cold, the intonation so precisely centered that you stop noticing intonation at all, which is the highest compliment you can pay a string player. The Intermezzo has a wonderful, unforced sway to it — those lower-string passages are beautifully graded, no scratch, no edge, just a warm equalized column of tone from bottom to top. Some listeners raised on Heifetz’s whiplash virtuosity, or on Perlman’s opulence, may miss the visceral heat. Fair enough. But listen to the Andante: there’s a purity there, an almost vocal line, that neither Heifetz nor Perlman quite attempts, because it isn’t their business. It’s Grumiaux’s.

He studied with Alfred Dubois, who studied with Eugène Ysaÿe — this is lineage, not accident. The whole Franco-Belgian tradition runs through these performances like a watermark: the bow arm economical, the vibrato fast but never wobbly (compare Ricci, compare even the wonderful, wayward Spivakovsky, and you hear how disciplined Grumiaux’s oscillation actually is), the phrasing shaped by structural logic rather than momentary impulse.

Saint-Saëns gets similarly civilized treatment, though “civilized” undersells the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso‘s bravura once the Rondo proper kicks in. Grumiaux takes the opening with a deliberateness that borders on the risky — you wait, and wait, for the tempo to snap forward — and when it does, the articulation is dazzling: crisp, weightless, every note in the rapid passagework audible rather than smeared into a blur. It’s a interpretation built on contrast rather than continuous excitement, which some will find studied. I find it exhilarating precisely because he holds so much in reserve early on.

The Havanaise is the disc’s warmest moment — genuinely tender in the opening habanera rhythm, with Rosenthal’s orchestra breathing along in gentle sympathy, before the central allegro turns motoric, almost obsessive, a contained frenzy rather than an unleashed one.

Chausson’s Poème may be the finest thing here. This is a score that invites melodrama — violinists tend to declaim it, practically weep on cue. Grumiaux goes the other way entirely. His reading is inward, veiled, almost withdrawn in the opening measures, tone deliberately pulled back, vibrato narrowed nearly to nothing. It plays like a private reverie rather than a public confession. Whether that’s truer to Chausson’s own melancholy, tubercular temperament — he died absurdly, in a bicycle accident, at forty-four, just as his gifts were deepening — is a question worth sitting with. I lean toward yes.

Ravel’s Tzigane is, inevitably, the odd one out. This is trickster music, half Lisztian showpiece, half sardonic parody of gypsy fiddling, and it wants a player willing to look a little unhinged — Ginette Neveu had that wildness, so did the young Kyung Wha Chung decades later. Grumiaux doesn’t dig in the way the piece sometimes seems to demand; the harmonics in the opening cadenza are exquisitely tuned rather than eerily suggestive, the con fuoco passages controlled rather than combustible. It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just not quite Tzigane’s native language.

Rosenthal, ninety-seven when this reissue first circulated and one of the last living links to Ravel himself, conducts with idiomatic ease throughout — the Lamoureux strings have a period tang, a portamento-inflected sweetness that younger orchestras have since scrubbed away. Philips’s engineering, from 1963 and 1966, has aged remarkably well: airy, unforced, with the violin placed forward but never spotlit.

Not the most incendiary Symphonie espagnole on record, nor the most unbuttoned Tzigane. But for sheer tonal beauty, structural intelligence, and that particular French-Belgian sense that expression and refinement are not opposites — this disc has few equals, and Grumiaux, gone now more than three decades, remains one of its unimprovable witnesses.