Leonid Kogan – Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto (180g LP)

Label: Testament / EMI Columbia – SAX2323  

AAA 100% Analogue –  Mastered at Abbey Road

Pressed at Pallas – Limited Edition

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.

Leonid Kogan’s performance of this concert is outstanding, IMHO it is the best on records. The recording quality is impeccable and uncompressed 5/5 LPreview

Violinist Leonid Kogan performs Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major along with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra conducted by Constantin Silvestri.

These two works are closely connected and it is interesting to have them recorded together. Both date from the year 1878, when Tchaikovsky had fled abroad after his abortive marriage and was staying with his brother Modest on the Lake of Geneva. Visiting them was Yosif Yosifovich Kotek, a student from Tchaikovsky’s composition class at the Moscow Conservatoire, who had also distinguished himself in the violin class. They had previously played together Brahms’ first symphony, which Tchaikovsky found ‘dark, cold and pretentious’. At Clarens, however, they found Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole” much more to their taste and it was his enthusiasm for this music that caused the composer to drop his work on the G Major piano sonata and embark on the violin concerto.

This is probably one of the receptacles in which the specific nature of the great Russians most clearly manifests itself in the perpetual shadow David Oistrakh. The makellose technique, the shining sound – and the abysses. It may be difficult to find a recording of this concert, which has so often been recorded, in which so many of them are revealed, in which melancholy and fear behind the virtuoso façade are so tangible, so tangible. The critics often spoke of “cold fire” in connection with Kogan, and this was not always meant to be positive; He was accused of putting technology about emotion. Perhaps because the kind of emotion that Kogan put into his game did not correspond to the usual reading or listening style of the works. Anyway here gets the “cold fire” a very different, often oppressive Meaning: The radiant, elegant Heifetz interpretation opposite this receiving diametrically.