Violinist David Oistrakh was born on September 30, 1908 on Odessa, Russia, now Ukraine. He died on October 24, 1974 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Few artists have made the art of playing the violin look so effortless. On occasion, Oistrakh’s unfussy though commanding stage presence and technical ease were such that the listener was left quite unaware of the challenges being overcome. This sense extended to his interpretative style, which while never actually cool, tended to be devoid of all excess and indulgence.
When listening to an Oistrakh performance – most especially his studio recordings – it is the accumulation of the whole that tends to leave the most profound impression, rather than the emotional resonance of individual moments.
In Mozart and Beethoven he was eminently straightforward, inflecting his bowing with many subtleties of angle, pressure and placement between fingerboard and bridge.
In the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, he adapted his essentially cushioned style of bowing to produce a less sensuously alluring tone.
In Romantic repertoire, Oistrakh was expressively more flexible, most notably in the opening movement of the Tchaikovsky Concerto, whose patchwork-quilt structuring was mirrored in Oistrakh’s keenly responsive emotional patterning.
Here is Mr. Oistrakh in a wonderful performance of a violin sonata by Mozart:
