Six months before settling for good in the USA, Bartok gave a recital in the Library of Congress with his old friend Szigeti, who had already escaped from war-torn Europe: the emotional intensity of that reunion was captured in this recording (on acetate discs) made by Harold Spivacke (the director of the Library's Music Division). Its transfer to CD has vastly improved the sound-quality (about which I had reservations on the LP issue), and skilful filtering has reduced the acetate surface noise to negligible proportions, so that attention can now be focused without distraction on the music. The real value of the disc (which shows Szigeti at the peak of his form) lies in the performances of the works by Bartok himself—the First Rhapsody (which he had dedicated to the violinist) and the Second Sonata: these must stand as classic yardsticks for these compositions. In the case of the sonata—one of Bartok's toughest and most dissonant works—the recording is all the more valuable because Szigeti himself, in his book With strings attached (Cassell: 1949), was apparently unaware of its existence and expressed ''eternal regret that I failed to record it with him when we recorded Contrasts''. Its barbaric exoticism seems to have fired both artists (though Szigeti was cool-headed enough—if misguided—to tune his E string in a four-bar rest); and the friss of the folky First Rhapsody bubbles with irresistible gusto.
The rest of the programme is best passed over rapidly. The Debussy is idiosyncratic, even eccentric (the word ''unemotional'' in my 1965 review must have been a misreading of my writing of ''overemotional''), with a particularly gusty finale; and the Kreutzer Sonata, though Bartok conveys Beethoven's furious energy, is disfigured by unwanted rubatos and speed changes, Bartok's left-hand-before-right treatment of chords (something he doesn't do in the other works) and far from accurate broken octaves, and decidedly hit-or-miss ensemble in the finale. Exciting to those present at the time, doubtless, but not standing up to scrutiny later.'