AVAILABILITY
www.symposiumrecords.co.uk
The
meteoric career of Ossy Renardy and
its tragic denouement could stand as
a paradigm of gilded youth, silenced.
Born Oskar Reiss in Vienna in 1920 a
peripatetic, essentially untutored,
boyhood career saw him starring in variety
shows alongside showmen and strongmen
until, like the Czech virtuoso Příhoda,
he was discovered in Italy and a career
was launched. He made a New York debut
at the age of eighteen and in anticipation
of the centenary of Paganini’s death
he played the 24 Caprices at Carnegie
Hall. The impact must have been substantial
because the following year he was asked
to record them, the first integral set
ever committed to disc, albeit in David’s
anachronistic piano accompanied version.
From then his career was American based
and after war service he resumed touring
in 1947. He died in a car crash in 1953
having shortly before re-recorded the
Caprices. His pianist in the earlier
recording and steadfast accompanist
Walter Robert survived the crash.
The
focus of Symposium’s disc, rightly,
is the 1940 set of the Caprices. Predating
Ricci’s recording of them, the Renardy
has a few nips and tucks in addition
to the skeletal piano part – some repeats
are omitted, and a number of very small
cuts are made. In comparison with Ricci’s
febrile playing and his daredevil persona
Renardy is very much more elegant and
Viennese and much less inclined to emotive
and tonal volatility. The technique
is not transcendental but it is certainly
astonishing enough; and nothing is for
show with Renardy lavishing great care
and affection on them. There is not
much to choose between this transfer
and that by Biddulph a decade ago on
their double CD tribute to Renardy.
Maybe the Symposium has rather more
surface noise but it sounds bright nevertheless.
That
Biddulph disc, which I assume will be
reintroduced to the market as the label
gets into reissuing its back catalogue,
also contained the Zarzycki, Ernst and
Dvořák as well as Saint-Saëns’
first Violin Concerto in piano reduction
form. Symposium includes a fine Corelli
Sonata. Elsewhere he is dashing in the
Zarzycki, not quite tonally adept enough
in the Dvořák, and though convincing
in the Ernst does tend to thinness –
that intense vibrato and piquant playing
and the devilishly good pizzicati can’t
quite efface a lack of sophistication
in vibrato usage. There is a definite
change in recording quality in the two
Sarasate morceaux which sound decidedly
less good as recordings but are played
with cavalier bravado.
The
notes are useful and full matrix details
are given but not issue numbers or recording
dates. Brief as his career was and circumscribed
though it necessarily had to be Renardy’s
is a name that, like Hassid’s or Weisbord’s
or Hochstein’s will always be tinged
with a sense of loss and of promise
unfulfilled.
Jonathan
Woolf
Ossy Renardy (violin) 
