Cast
Program notes
The great director, violinist, and writer Bruno Monsaingeon—whose incredible documentaries you can discover on medici.tv—takes an admiring look back on one of the most significant violinists of the 20th century, David Oistrakh, through priceless archival footage from Soviet television, painstakingly rediscovered and restored. The career of the virtuoso, born in Odessa in 1908, is inextricable from the tumultuous political climate of his time, marked by the October Revolution; it wasn't until his victory in the first Queen Elisabeth Competition (then named for Eugène Ysaÿe) in 1937, not long before his 30th birthday, that he won renown on a global scale, becoming "a paragon of patience and stubbornness."
In this third and final volume of Monsaingeon's David Oistrakh Cycle: a "masterly, inspired, and finally, so natural performance" of the final movement of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata; the famed Liebesleid by Fritz Kreisler, performed by Oistrakh with tenderness and melancholy in the 1930s; and a fully mature interpretation of the lavish and legendary Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, recorded with the Moscow Philharmonic for Oistrakh's 60th birthday. After the rapturous ovation, Locatelli's Harmonic Labyrinth resounds brilliantly in the arrangement for violin and orchestra by Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
