Leonid Kogan – Beethoven: Violin concerto (180g LP)

Label: Testament / EMI Columbia – SAX 2386 

AAA 100% Analogue –  Audiophile Mastering at Abbey Road – Pressed at Pallas 

Testament has revived these classic titles from the EMI catalog using only the original EMI master tapes,cut onto lacquer at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios and mastered using full analog techniques throughout production.

This is one of those performances that are for the ages. Kogan gives a reading with great depth and feeling. IMHO this is the best version ever recorded so far.5/5 Vinylreview

It may be the same note, but in this case interpretations are fundamentally pointless: as great as the recordings of contemporaries like Heifetz or Schneiderhan may be; Which Kogan puts into the score – he had found a perfect partner in the Exilrumänen Constantin Silvestri for it – is completely different music. It is not his “sound”, though this is also unique in its clarity, its firmness, its rapid vibrato at the border to perceptibility; It is something which, one forgives the stereotypical formulation, seems to come from the depths of Kogan’s soul: the soul of a man who could only be made to speak by his instrument. Incredible music. – The Testament Reissue may sound absolutely compete with an original – which, as indicated, without this is hardly affordable. LP Magazine

BEETHOVEN Violin Concerto in D Major Op. 61 Leonid Kogan, Orchestra de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire / Constantin Silvestri. EMI Columbia LP 180g Vinyl

Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is perhaps the most important composition of the violin concerto repertoire and sits comfortably in the ‘Big Three’ along side Tchaikovsky and Brahms violin concerto’s (and for us at ERC the Sibelius making the ‘Big Four’).

Leonid Kogan is truly breath-taking and masterful in his interpretation of this majestic violin concerto. So compelling is Kogan’s performance your attention is demanded (and willingly submitted) from start to finish… an emotional journey of the highest order.

1806 was the year after the composition of Fidelio, the year of its first revision, and the year in which Beethoven wrote three sunny masterpieces, the serenest and most loving of which is certainly this violin concerto.

1806 was the year after the composition of Fidelio, the year of its first revision, and the year in which Beethoven wrote three sunny masterpieces, the serenest and most loving of which is certainly this violin concerto. He dedicated it, not to the co-operative lady friend of the moment, but to his boyhood friend Stephan von Breuning, a character who emerges more finely from the tale of Beethoven’s life than any of his other friends.

Hardly a violinist of the “Golden Era” is ritually worshiped as Leonid Kogan (This is also reflected in the prices of the original LPs). The musicians, retreating into the public, shy away from the public, are surrounded by an aura of the mysterious, gloomy – which one can also hear. His particularly legendary recording of the Beethoven concert is a heavy, tragedy that probably no one else has been banned in this intensity on record. It expresses itself in the delicate moments of the work in minute dynamic nuances, in a phrasing art, which inevitably banishes the listener.