All Hands on Decca

From the Recordings Vault Dept.: I’m guessing that it was the Gershwin pieces, which included arrangements of the Three Preludes, that impelled Heifetz to jump from RCA Victor to Decca in 1945 in order to record a host of short violin pieces. I also suspect he was trying to win some kind of financial concession from RCA, to which he returned after that Petrillo strike mentioned below. The Decca sides also were included in the first Complete Heifetz set; by the time the second appeared, RCA (by then a Sony acquisition) had lost the rights, which went to Deutsche Grammophon, on which label a set of the Deccas appeared. They’ve also been issued in Europe and elsewhere by Naxos as part of a two-disc set that also includes Heifetz’s V-Disc recordings.

                                                                                           

ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES OF THE early 1940s was the nearly complete loss of the transition from swing to be-bop. A recording ban instituted by the musicians union’s own Hitler, James Petrillo, stopped such progress dead for many, many months.

One of the first labels to agree to the union’s demands was Decca, and violinist Jascha Heifetz, otherwise a lifelong RCA Victor artist, waxed a number of sides with them, many of which have been unavailable for almost 20 years (some for more than 40).

It’s a collection that duplicates his later, stereo output only a little, and wins in performance comparison. And who can resist the curiosity of the two sides he cut in 1946 with Bing Crosby, as if to attempt a latter-day Fritz Kreisler-John McCormack union?

Heifetz, a longtime Gershwin fan, transcribed selections from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” for violin and piano shortly before recording them in 1945. The arrangements are reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century showpieces Heifetz grew up with, but the playing has the gutsy intensity of one well aware of the lyrics. Although the recordings never sounded very good to begin with and suffered more distortion en route to compact disc, Heifetz plays with a passion that doesn’t come through in his 1965 re-recording of the Gershwin.

This set also includes Robert Russell Bennett’s fascinating, dated “Hexapoda,” a work that was supposed to bring a swing-era styling into the concert hail. Whether it did so is debatable, but Heifetz and pianist Emanuel Bay make the five-movement suite sound properly idiomatic.

A lot of American music is tucked into these discs; Heifetz arranged two Stephen Foster songs and “Deep River” for violin and piano and plays them here with no shame whatsoever. There also are works by Clarence Cameron White, Susan Dyer, Victor Herbert, Samuel Gardner and Cecil Burleigh. And Irving Berlin. Without Bing this time, Heifetz recorded “White Christmas” with Tutti Camarata’s orchestra.

Violinists don’t play these salon and encore pieces in concert these days, and it’s a shame: Who wouldn’t like Arthur Benjamin’s quirky “Jamaican Rumba” or Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s hilarious, challenging arrangement of the “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s Barber of Seville? Maybe a few hours spent with these recordings might change their minds.

Jascha Heifetz
The Decca Masters, MCA

– Metroland Magazine, 5 January 1989