David Oistrakh: Artist Of The People?

I belong to the generation that as students drooled over David Oistrakh’s new recordings, but then had quite a surprise when on stage we saw a dour person whose face showed so little emotion. Even more infuriating was his ability to make everything look so ridiculously easy, with technical challenges just swept aside.

This 1994 documentary from the French violinist and film-maker Bruno Monsaingeon traces Oistrakh’s life from early years spent in his native Odessa through to the time when, as a young Jew in the Soviet Union, his career was only as good as his last competition result.

He triumphed in one after another, while the Communist authorities used that success to bolster the image of their regime.That he was financially exploited by that regime is made abundantly clear in a film interview with Yehudi Menuhin, who condemns the fact that Oistrakh was forced to perform incessantly and that everything he earnt abroad was channelled back to the party machine.

The musical excerpts are historically interesting but are often in grainy black and white with indifferent sound quality, giving little evidence of his great performances. But many close-ups show a bowing technique every student should study, for it produced those incomparable long-spun passages of lyric beauty.

Oistrakh’s son, Igor, adds family touches, including the fact that his father played the violin incessantly, and before he did anything in the morning he would play an excruciatingly difficult passage, only after which he seemed content.

Lucid subtitles, when the soundtrack is not in English, provide the finishing touch to a fascinating disc.