Content area
Full Text
Efrem Zimbalist: A Life. By Roy Malan. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2004. [xii, 368 p. ISBN 1-57467-091-3. $29.95.] Bibliography, discography, index.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the violin studio of Leopold Auer at the Conservatory of Music in St. Petersburg, Russia produced some of the greatest violinists of the era. Among the many luminaries of the violin world that were to emerge from Auer's conservatory classes, perhaps the three greatest stars were Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, and Efrem Zimbalist.
Efrem Alexandrovich Zimbalist, famed concert violinist, pedagogue, composer, and long-time director of the Curds Institute of Music, was born in 1890 in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-na-Donu. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1907 after winning a gold medal and the Rubenstein Prize, and by age 21 was considered one of the world's greatest violinists (Boris Schwarz, Great Masters of the Violin [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983], p. 431). In 2005, recordings are all that we have left of the sonic artistry of the giants of violin playing from the first half of the twentieth century, and comparisons of recorded performances of the major literature continue to spark lively debates among violinists as to whom was the best executant of any given piece. While many of the other great violin virtuosos of the first half of the twentieth century such as Heifetz, Elman, Joseph Szigeti, Nathan Milstein, and Fritz Kreisler bequeathed to the musical world a rich legacy of recordings of the major violin repertoire, the discography found in the present work contains no extant commercial recordings by Zimbalist of any of the standard concerto literature for the violin. Perhaps the dearth of recordings of the major sonata and concerto repertoire...