Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a violinist who has occasionally been known to utter things like "Oistrakh is God!" I am very happy to see this collection come out and I may well pick it up, even though I have almost all the recordings on vinyl. But a few words of caution might be in order, given what I can glean from the track listings and the review that lists the performers and tracks more thoroughly. First I should say that there are many great recordings here. The Cluytens/Beethoven Concerto is certainly up there with the greatest recordings of this piece, as is the Brahms Double with Szell and Rostropovich. And no one plays Mozart better than Oistrakh; the set is surely worth owning for the Mozart concerti alone. His EMI recordings of the Khatchaturian and Shostakovish #1 concerti are the definitive versions of those works (with one caveat: he does not play Khatchaturian's original cadenza, which is fine with some people, but I personally wish he had.) The recordings of both Prokofiev concerti and the Violin Sonatas are also all but definitive; I know of none better, though occasionally someone comes close. Of great interest to me is the recording of the Lalo Symphonie Espagnole with Jean Martinon; my collection of more than 40 Oistrakh disks includes a great performance of this piece with Kondrashin, but I have never heard the one in this set. That said, I have several reservations about this edition. First, I am of the remastering school. I have hardly ever heard a CD transfer, classical or otherwise, that was not improved by a careful remastering job (though a lousy job can surely destroy a recording too). I do not see any reference to remastering in the listing, so I assume it is a straight transfer. Which would be too bad, because no recorded legacy is more worthy of careful remastering than that of David Oistrakh. On the other hand, the set would surely have doubled in price, so I suppose there is something to be said for mass availability. Second, I'm afraid this does not look to me like the complete EMI collection. Some of the things I noticed missing are the second Shostakovish violin concerto (not equal to the first, but necessary for completeness), and the recordings made with Frida Bauer: Didone Abandonata and Devil's Trill sonata of Tartini, and Brahms Sonata #1. These gaps are based on a quick perusal of my recordings; it would surprise me if they were the only ones. Incidentally, the track listing (in both the Amazon track list and the user review) includes a Mozart violin sonata "#32 in B-flat, K.454". There is no such work. The work is probably the Mozart violin and piano sonata #15, K.454, and it is in E-flat. Third, while this should not discourage anyone from acquiring this rich collection of recordings, I cannot help but be reminded how many of Oistrakh's most important recordings were not on EMI. His mesmerizing recordings of the Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Glazunov and Dvorak concerti are nowhere to be found here. Neither is his greatest recording of the Sibelius concerto, with Ormandy. His recording of the Bach sonatas for violin and harpsichord, released on DG, are surely among my desert island disks. There is no recording here of the Chausson Poeme, at which he is one of the great masters. Ditto the Ysaye Ballade and the Debussy Sonata, both released on a Phillips collection. The first Schubert Piano Trio is there, but the David Oistrakh Trio also recorded the second one for Melodya, which jointly released it with a German label. And there is not a single example of his joint recordings with Igor, who was, by some bizzare miracle of nature, almost as great a fiddler as his father. So all in all, my advice is: enjoy this collection, but don't forget it just scratches the surface of the work of this musical genius.