Oscar Shumsky's admirers will have been eagerly awaiting his recording of the Beethoven Concerto, and it will not disappoint them: it has unfailing purity and beauty of tone, unassertively elegant phrasing and a characteristic refusal to let interpretative quirks or violinistic display stand in the way of the music. He allows a bit less postBeethovenian rhetoric to obtrude in the Kreisler cadenzas than many violinists (no sense of our having suddenly wandered off into another concerto) and, most Shumskian feature of all, he is often quite audibly listening appreciatively to the orchestra, enjoying for example his task of accompanying the bassoon in the finale's first episode. It is slightly less characterful and less colourful playing than Itzhak Perlman's on EMI but I found Shumsky's solution to the difficult problem of how to phrase the theme of the finale as convincing as and more satisfying than most. Where Perlman takes it with a brisk, springy dapperness and Frank Zimmermann (also on EMI) with just a trace of a mannered scoop, Shumsky observes the markings precisely, enjoys the guttiness of the G string and distils the character of the theme ideally: it is often his way to achieve as much as others while 'interpreting' less.
The Philharmonia sound bigger and in softer focus under Andrew Davis's direction than they did under Giulini; perhaps to allow for this Shumsky is placed rather forward, and some of his quieter playing (in that duet with the bassoon, for example, or in the magical passage following the first movement cadenza) sounds less quiet than it no doubt was. The warmish acoustic also softens the drums at the very opening of the Concerto. But like Perlman's this is a performance of basically romantic rather than classical scale, and many will enjoy the size and opulence (and the wide dynamic range) of the sound. Despite Zimmermann's rather unremitting and rather wide vibrato, which robs his playing of purity at times I still enjoy returning to his performance for its cleaner and crisper sonority (Jeffrey Tate using a markedly smaller orchestra than Davis or Giulini, of course), its leaner textures and less ample gestures. When wanting a more traditional view of the Concerto (closer to Mendelssohn and Brahms than to Mozart) I shall happily turn to Shumsky's.'