The French film maker Bruno Monsaingeon, to whom music-lovers are already indebted for his wonderful documentaries on, among others, Sviatoslav Richter, Glenn Gould, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Julia Varady, the Arod Quartet and Klaus Mäkelä, further puts us in his debt with a true labour of love that turns the spotlight on the artistry of the Soviet violinist David Oistrakh, the 50th anniversary of whose far-too-early death fell on October 24. Warner Classics has issued a 61-disc set that not only gathers together all of Oistrakh’s commercial recordings made for HMV and Columbia (27 CDs), but supplements them with another 30 discs devoted to ‘Premières, Rarities and Live Performances’ that Monsaingeon has gathered in the course of a 60-year admiration for the musician. As well as a very fine note for the booklet by Monsaingeon himself, the set also contains his 1995 film David Oistrakh – People’s Artist?, which gives a fascinating, and often moving, overview of the violinist’s life and work (you can also watch it on YouTube and Medici.TV; it is well worth an hour and a quarter of your time).

Monsaingeon, an accomplished violinist himself, holds two players – who, incidentally, were good friends – particularly close to his heart, Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh. As he writes in his note, ‘as far as I’m concerned, it’s as simple and this: for originality of sound, mastery of the instrument and force of musical personality, there’s the young Menuhin and there’s David Oistrakh. Behind them follow the other greats, who can actually be counted on the fingers of one hand’ – the other digits of that extraordinary hand being Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein.

I went to visit Monsaingeon – urbane, charming and passionate about music (a true mélomane, as the French would say) – at his home in Paris which bursts at the seams with memorabilia, music, CDs, books and spools of film, to talk about Oistrakh. Inevitably, the opening question was about his first encounter with this remarkable musician. ‘It all started with a recording of Mozart’s A major Concerto [No 5, K219], and funnily it was the Joachim cadenza that struck me – the way Oistrakh integrated the portamento into the whole line. I have an autographed copy of that recording because Oistrakh came to Paris and Le Chant du Monde organised a signing session in the Rue Vivienne. I was about 10, and I’d already been to my first Oistrakh concert – and I can still remember exactly what he played: the Didone Abbandonata Sonata by Tartini, the Franck Sonata, the Prokofiev Second Sonata, the Schumann Fantasy arranged by Kreisler, and the three Szymanowski Mythes, and then, as an encore, the Ravel Tzigane and the Variations on a theme of Tartini by Kreisler. I remember in the Mythes there’s that series of harmonics very high up on the G string – I’d been playing the violin for a while but I’d never seen anything like this! I was awe-struck!’

Bruno Monsaingeon filming at the Fondation Singer-Polignac in Paris (photo: Denis de Marney/Warner Classics)

The young Monsaingeon went backstage after the concert because he wanted to say hello. But he had no Russian, or German, and Oistrakh had no French, but he recalled Oistrakh’s ‘benevolent, lovely warm expression’. And Oistrakh said something to the effect that if you want to contact me you’ll have to learn Russian. That night, Monsaingeon went home and began learning the language – one that he now speaks very well – and it also started a long relationship with Russia and its people.

‘Then came a 1952 recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra conducted by Nikolai Golovanov’, Monsaingeon continues. ‘It had such intensity. The violin solos were played by Oistrakh. The beauty of his playing – the legato, the absolute mastery of all the lines, whether virtuoso or simply singing – was riveting. I’ve no idea how, or why, my parents had acquired the record.’

Later, in 1966, as a friend of the American, but Paris-based, pianist Julius Katchen, Monsaingeon spent a week with Oistrakh in Prades, when both were playing at Casals’s festival. ‘Oistrakh was completely free there,’ Monsaingeon recalls. ‘The KGB clearly didn’t think it necessary to follow him. He even rented a car, a little Peugeot, which was unheard of for Soviet artists. It was a wonderful week. He was very relaxed. He rehearsed a lot, and he loved playing all that chamber music. And of course he had immense admiration for Casals.’

That same year, 1966, Monsaingeon met Yehudi Menuhin and soon formed a close friendship with him, often playing the violin together, but also talking about music – and luckily there is extensive footage of those conversations, often fascinatingly perceptive, that have appeared in various of Monsaingeon’s films. In fact, Menuhin would become the central voice in Monsaingeon’s Oistrakh film.

Oistrakh was born in 1908, so would still have been a young boy at the time of the Revolution. Throughout his life he worked within the Soviet system. He represented his country in competitions, invariably achieving a high place (he’d come second to the 16-year-old Ginette Neveu at the Henryk Wieniawski Competition in Warsaw in 1935) until his life-changing triumph at the 1937 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. He did what he was told, he worked very hard and he never spoke about the Soviet regime. This allowed him a degree of freedom – he could travel and, initially, he could keep the money he earned abroad (this enabled him to buy a Stradivarius, then a high but not astronomical expense, as well as an apartment). Monsaingeon points out, with begrudging admiration, that the Soviet authorities were very shrewd, and invariably got it ‘right’, as to whom they chose to travel to the West. And it’s thanks to this dispensation that we have so many commercial Oistrakh recordings with major Western orchestras and conductors.

Oistrakh, though, had lived through Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and Monsaingeon is convinced this shaped the man, and moulded his stoic attitude. Rozhdestvensky and Rostropovich were from the next generation (born in 1931 and 1927 respectively) and so would not have been old enough to witness the terror of that period, when people lived with a packed suitcase by the front door, awaiting that knock, and then were never seen again. Rozhdestvensky, who was never a Party Member, would skilfully play off his roles as the Head of the Bolshoi Theatre and as Head of its orchestra against each other, always avoiding having to sign up by pleading he was too busy with his other professional concern. Both men spoke up, Rostropovich famously with his very public support of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But Oistrakh chose his own path – and Monsaingeon rightly defends anyone who has lived through such horror, and absolutely refuses to judge – and would turn up to the interminable Party sessions, and sit through them, later telling a pupil that they were a great opportunity to catch up on sleep! He accepted this part of his life with patience and total silence.

Monsaingeon has many stories from his numerious visits to Russia for his documentary, often when he was tracking down recordings he knew must exist. Often a bottle or two of vodka or a $100 bill would jog people’s memories or grease the locks of hitherto impenetrable archives. One recording must serve as an example. He’d seen a poster for a 100th anniversary concert of the Moscow Conservatory and it listed a performance of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Oistrakh, Rostropovich and Richter (the same line-up of soloists as on the famous Karajan HMV recording from 1969), and with Kirill Kondrashin conducting the Moscow Philharmonic. It had been broadcast, and also filmed, so he was pretty sure it must exist somewhere. He managed to track down someone who’d been a broadcasting company archivist who lived not in Moscow but in Krasnogorsk, about 30 miles from the capital. ‘I must have walked through the snow for about three or four hours to reach him,’ Monsaingeon recalls. ‘He’d been instructed to destroy the tape because Rostropovich had left the Soviet Union, and was persona non grata. He was one of those wonderful people you find in Russia – and perhaps this is a byproduct of a totalitarian regime as well. He’d kept the tape but he’d given it a new label – something innocuous, like “Telemann Tafelmusik” – and only he knew what it really contained. I remember getting back to Moscow with my producer and we took out this two-inch tape from 1970 and put it on and “Daah, da, da, daah, da, daah”. We knew immediately we had the Beethoven Triple! But there was no picture. Then someone kicked the machine and the picture miraculously appeared!’ (A similarly officially ordained fate awaited the recordings made by the string quartet David Oistrakh formed with fellow violinist, and his teaching assistant at the Moscow Conservatoire, Piotr Bondarenko, viola-player Mikhail Terian and cellist Sviatoslav Knushevitsky. Though some still exist, and have been released on various archive labels, many of the quartet’s recordings were destroyed, on official orders, because Bondarenko emigrated to Israel in 1977.)

Monsaingeon has curated his contribution to the set with great care, often choosing works that Oistrakh neverrecorded commercially. Oistrakh gave a huge number of concerts in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, or Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall, from the 1940s onwards, and they were often broadcast – and they reveal Oistrakh’s extraordinary breadth of repertoire, much of it either not played in the West, or dropped from his repertoire as time passed. Many of these show a side of the player that many people overlook, his astounding virtuosity. There are also quite a few concertos performed with piano accompaniment, the fruit of the many gruelling tours he undertook to the four corners of the USSR and beyond (the Bruch hails from China, the Sibelius from Montevideo). There’s also a precious disc devoted to Bach – when Monsaingeon pleaded with him to record the solo sonatas and partitas, Oistrakh wrote back that ‘I’m not ready yet to play these masterpieces’.

David Oistrakh died of a heart attack in Amsterdam while on tour: he was 66. Yehudi Menuhin attributed his early death to the Soviet state simply working him into an early grave. ‘Oistrakh said that he hoped he’d die while he still played the violin,’ Monsaingeon recalls. ‘It’s a strange phrase, and of course he did. And there was no deterioration in his playing at all. People have started to realise the greatness of this musician. There’s not just the virtuosity, the technical mastery – which was staggering – but there’s a nobility of style. He never showed off. His sole motivation was his relationship with the score, the music.’

Read the review: ‘David Oistrakh: The Warner Remastered Edition’

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today