Change of tack.
In many ways air travel transformed our cultural world, quickly transporting top artists to distant lands where audiences could thrill to their talent and vastly expand the ranks of their ardent fans, but it also cruelly deprived us of three artists who arguably would have become the top musicians of their generation – conductor Guido Cantelli, pianist William Kapell and violinist
Ginette Neveu, all killed in air crashes while on concert tours. Potter undoubtedly meant it as a compliment when he wrote that Neveu played the Beethoven
Concerto “with the strength and dash of a man.” Indeed, she made no pretense of being “feminine” or playing in the stereotyped tender manner expected of her gender. Rather, the overriding quality of her few recordings is their sincerity and focus, although her exquisite vibrato, subtle gradations of tone and carefully-sculpted dynamics do tend to emerge most compellingly in quiet, lyrical sections (I’ve never been a huge fan of her acclaimed 1946 Sibelius
Violin Concerto led by Walter Susskind), all of which is to say that s
he was an ideal interpreter of the Beethoven concerto, which she never lived to record. Captured in concert one month before she died en route to America, this performance boasts an especially moving larghetto in which each note receives its due, with Rosbaud and his orchestra in full sync. Neveu was already a formidable, mature artist, and was taken from us far too soon. We can only mourn for the many decades of her career that remained unfulfilled and celebrate opportunities such as this to revel in the shards of her art that survive.
Å ja da.