Something Old ...

For his guest stint with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony last week, Violinist Tossy Spivakovsky offered a careful balance: something old, something new. First he flooded the hall with the singing airs of Mozart's Adagio in E. Then, tucking his fiddle under his chin again and staring intently at his stubby fingers, he launched into the amiable and sometimes pyrotechnic moods of Gian-Carlo Menotti's two-year-old Violin Concerto. As always, his tone was luxuriant, his pitch impeccable, and he brought the music to full-blooded life. From Manhattan's experienced audience, the modern work drew down an extra round of applause.

Russian-born Violinist Spivakovsky learned to balance his repertory by experience. When he arrived in the U.S. in 1940 (at the age of 33), he already had 20 years of concert experience. He could spin out the Tchaikovsky Concerto with every Slavic sob intact, and he was the master, in lofty interpretations, of the Beethoven and Brahms concertos as well.

But as one of the younger generation of musicians, he had a strong bent for the moderns, the more "difficult" the better. He made his first big splash when he introduced the spectacularly demanding Bartok Concerto to the U.S. in Cleveland in 1943, continued to get billowing reactions wherever he played it. ("Was this the best since Heifetz," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein after a 1948 performance, "or was this just the best, period?")

The word got around among U.S. orchestras: if you want to perform a modern violin score, get Spivakovsky. Temperamentally, that was fine for the fiddler, but to programmers and booking agents too much modern music is not good business. Tossy Spivakovsky learned that there was such a thing as an unbalanced portfolio, successfully set out to rid himself of the modernist tag.

Today, with a reputation as one of the most brilliant violinists alive, Spivakovsky usually limits himself to one modern work on each recital program. His aim: to live long enough to see the programmers demand more.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.