Made in 1994, Bruno Monsaingeon’s film dedicated to the violinist David Oïstrakh (1908-1974) draws on archival documents whose rarity dictates the price. Opening with Claude Debussy’s La Plus que parfait, a waltz composed in 1910 and captured here in Moscow in 1936 in a modern style scenography; the Henryk-Wieniawski competitions, in Warsaw in 1935, and Ysaÿe, in Brussels in 1937, which revealed David Fyodorovitch Oïstrakh, a native of Odessa (Ukraine). But also the Concerto (1845) by Felix Mendelssohn, which he imposed in Berlin in 1939, or the concert under the bombs in 1943 in Leningrad (the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia), then under siege.
Let us also cite sequences from the Concerto for two violins (1731) by Johann Sebastian Bach in Brussels, with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1958, from the Double concerto (1887) by Johannes Brahms in London in 1965, with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch, from the Symphony concertante (1770s) by Mozart, with his son Igor Oïstrakh (1931-2021), concertos by Tchaikovsky, Jean Sibelius, Dmitri Shostakovich…
“I was lucky,” says the violinist, “that great composers wrote for me: Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev and Shostakovich, who dedicated his second concerto to me for my sixtieth birthday. He was hospitalized the evening of the premiere and he followed it on the radio. » We can even hear the composer’s voice on the telephone: “Your interpretation is magnificent, it’s as if I had played it myself,” the author of the “Leningrad” Symphony (1941) and the The opera Lady Macbeth by Mzensk (1932), banned at the time by Joseph Stalin.
Without losing your soul
Testimonies and interviews with long-time friends and fellow musicians – that of Menuhin is particularly touching – complete the portrait painted by Bruno Monsaingeon, himself a former violinist, in an attempt to understand how the great virtuoso was able to serve Soviet propaganda without losing your soul. Rostropovich rightly mentions Oïstrakh’s relations with the regime. Former conductor of the Moscow Radio Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018) tells how he conducted all the major concertos for him.
Latvian violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer, for his part, recalls Professor David Oistrakh. Touching, too, the testimony of Igor Oïstrakh, who joined his father’s violin class alongside Gidon Kremer, and in turn became a renowned violinist, named “People’s Artist of Russia” in 1989 before ending his career as a teacher at the Brussels Conservatory, between 1996 and 2010.
“No matter how hard I search in my memory, I can’t see myself in childhood without a violin,” says David Oïstrakh in the documentary. I was 3 1/2 years old when my dad brought me a toy violin. While playing it, I imagined that I was a street violinist, a sad profession very common at that time in Odessa. But, for me, there could be no greater happiness. »
Gennady Rozhdestvensky has a phrase in the form of an epitaph: “if he had not remained silent, if he had spoken loudly and clearly, we would never have heard the sound of his violin.”
