Michel Schwalbe is probably best known as the distinguished First Concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic during the years 1957-86, the Karajan era give or take three years either end. Karajan had first worked with him in Lucerne in the late 1940s at a time when this prodigiously talented young Polish-born violinist was a recurrent figure on the Swiss musical scene: soloist, teacher and, at Ansermet’s behest, Concertmaster of the Suisse Romande Orchestra.
At his audition in Berlin in 1957, he played the first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto and Paganini’s 24th Caprice, the pizzicato played at a furious pace, two-handed, without the bow. ‘When I’d finished,’ he later recalled, ‘I heard someone laughing. I turned round and saw Karajan with his arms raised heavenward: “What more does anyone want? Enough, enough. Don’t go on”.’ The audition was a formality, of course; Karajan had determined to have Schwalbe as his Concertmaster the moment he inherited the BPO.
Trying to find out precisely where and when Schwalbe was born, I was astonished to find that neither Grove nor the Oxford Dictionary of Music (OUP: 1994) has an entry on him. The Biddulph note is also silent on these subjects, though it is rather more forthcoming on other matters. A graduate of the Warsaw Conservatoire, where he was taught by Auer’s assistant, Moritz Frenkel, Schwalbe won a diploma of honour at the International Wieniawski Competition ‘alongside Ginette Neveu and David Oistrakh’. (This would be 1935: Neveu won, Oistrakh was runner-up.) He later went on to study with George Enescu, Pierre Monteux and the veteran French teacher, Jules Boucherit (another non-person in the current Grove, though you will find him in Grove 5).
In the brilliance and ‘finish’ of his playing, Schwalbe was a shining example of what the great teachers of the old Franco-Belgian school could still produce. The repertoire for this disc, live performances well recorded by Swiss Radio in the early 1960s, has been expertly chosen. The slow movement of the Mendelssohn shows off the elegance and tensile beauty of Schwalbe’s playing, the outer movements its Gallic quickness of spirit (the ‘culture’, in a word, which Karajan clearly coveted). The Saint-Saens is the ‘representative’ work, representing the tradition to which Schwalbe was heir; the beautiful Wieniawski concerto a revisiting of the Franco-Polish past. The Wieniawski is a particular success since it is the one performance where there is a conductor (Skrowaczewski) who has things to say about the music which help to shade and deepen the effect of the performance as a whole.
Since these are live recordings, the playing is not absolutely without blemish (the end of the slow movement of the Saint-Saens would have been retaken in the studio) but this in no way detracts from the fascination these performances afford. Copies of the CD, please, to the Grove editorial department and Oxford University Press.'