We all know of Ferdinand David as leader of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in its heyday under Mendelssohn who, incidentally, constantly sought David's advice while composing his Violin Concerto before honouring him with the dedication and entrusting him with its premiere. Violinists may also remember David's teaching and editorial publications. But how many of us might have departed this life without ever encountering him as a composer (who wrote two symphonies and an opera as well as five concertos and many other works for his own instrument) but for this Vol. 16 in Leslie Howard's mammoth Liszt pilgrimage?
David's Bunte Reihe is in fact a series of 24 short character pieces for violin and piano, of special interest because written in the 12 major and 12 minor keys of the chromatic scale regardless of the problems posed by many of those keys for string players. As modest in emotional range as (for the most part) in technical demands, and closer to the world of Mendelssohn and Schumann than to the progressivists of the day, these miniatures (several in dance-rhythms, others variously entitled ''Kinderlied'', ''Capriccio'', ''Elegie'', ''Romanze'' and the like) are nevertheless often unpredictable enough in their turnings, with a fanciful enough charm of their own, to explain Liszt's championship in 1851. I was particularly taken with the F major ''Gondellied'', with its gently murmuring left-hand evocation of gliding through calm waters, and the guitar-inspired G sharp minor ''Serenade''. Sadly, I had to listen without scores: both David's original and Liszt's transcription are out of print and hard to find in lending libraries. But in his insert-note Howard assures us that ''Liszt remains absolutely faithful to David's text, allowing himself no harmonic or virtuosic elaboration''—except, of course, in his 'extra' No. 25 where he develops David's comparatively unmemorable No. 19, entitled ''Ungarisch'', into a much more arrestingly colourful and brilliant kind of miniature Hungarian Rhapsody.
Howard's cleanly reproduced playing struck me as both technically reliable and musically sympathetic in an aptly straightforward, unexaggerated way.'