Johanna Martzy & Ida Haendel - Mozart: Violin Concertos Nos. 3 & 4

180-gram audiophile vinyl pressed at Pallas in Germany

Cut at Emil Berliner Studio and mastered from the original tapes of SWR Music!

Johanna Martzy was one of Hungary's most notable musicians after the second World War and among the world's leading violin virtuosos in the '50s and early '60s. Her fame soon faded on international concert stages and her name became an insider tip. Her greatest period covered more than 25 years from 1942, when she debuted in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with Willem Mengelberg in Budapest, until the mid-1960s when she began to perform less and less after the birth of her daughter.

Although she had not appeared in her native land of Hungary since she fled from the Nazis in 1944, she nonetheless held a celebrated comeback concert in Budapest in 1969. Then she was found to have contracted hepatitis B which caused her strength to decline. She performed for the last time in 1976 and on August 13, 1979 — a good year after the death of her second husband — she died of cancer in Zurich.

What is interesting about these Stuttgart recordings of Mozart is not only how they compare with the commercial recordings, but also the fact that the D Major Concerto was produced as a studio production in the SDR Villa Berg studio in 1956, while the G Major Concerto was a live concert in the Liederhalle. The violinist seems to have placed less value than ever on post-production, nor did she need to. In Hans Muller-Kray, who was Principal Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1948 until his death, she had a solid, skilled partner at her side whose accompaniment in the G Major Concert turned out quite a bit more empathic and reserved than in the well-known recording with Jochum. Johanna Martzy's Mozart impresses not only due to its technical flawlessness, but also thanks to a tone that naturally blossoms from the breath of vibrant phrasing, her consummate mastery of the bow in all nuances from legato to spiccato, cultivated passion of expression that is always at the service of the musical line and known no willful extravagances, creating an artistic oneness out of the inner fire and the objectivity of a composition's style. — from liner notes by Christoph Schluren

"Violinist Johanna Martzy was hardly a prolific recording artist, which makes her few radio recordings desirable bonuses... A coupling of Mozart's Third and Fourth Violin Concertos, from 1962 and 1956 respectively, both featuring sturdy support from the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra under Hans Muller-Kray, exhibits Mozart's forthright approach and invariable warmth, performance that anticipate the stylistic unfussiness of our own time rather than Romantic manners of Martzy's era." — The Gramophone Magazine