Adila Fachiri and Marie Soldat (violin)
rec. 1921-35
Biddulph 85044-2 [73]

Joseph Joachim binds Adila Fachiri and Marie Soldat together. Fachiri was a great-niece of Joachim with whom she studied, having earlier been taught by Hubay. She and her sister Jelly d’Arányi were familiar figures in Britain for many years. Marie Soldat was introduced to Joachim by none other than Brahms – of whose Violin Concerto she gave the Viennese premiere and only the second Berlin performance, after Joachim – and she was to study with Joachim at the Hochschule für Musik.   

I reviewed Fachiri and Donald Francis Tovey’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth sonata when it appeared in its first restoration on Symposium twenty years ago, coupled with sonata performances given by Jenő Léner and Fritz Kreisler, and I have to repeat, almost verbatim, what I wrote then as my opinion of the performance remains unchanged. ‘This rare 1927 example of Tovey’s pianism was recorded for Compton Mackenzie’s National Gramophonic Society. The balance is disappointing, not least for Tovey’s very over-recorded piano (a boon to Tovey admirers of course but more troublesome in relation to ensemble). Fachiri’s accompanying figuration frequently goes for nothing courtesy of the recorded balance and her slow vibrato is idiosyncratic, doubtless a feature of her ingrained Hubay habits. One does feel that she is straining for a degree of phrasal elasticity that Tovey is disinclined to indulge. Tovey is at his most impressive in the slow movement – where he is veritably gale-like – whilst their finale is not especially buoyant and Fachiri’s lower strings sound rather pedestrian.’

To which I can only add that Tovey’s use of ritards and accelerandi are very marked, and that there is a creatively unstable rhythm from time to time. There’s also tension between Fachiri’s rather thin-toned, Hubay-derived playing and Tovey’s far more graphically sculpted pianism and to me there’s a shaky sense of ensemble, with two aesthetics at work. Tovey is very much the guiding light in what is very much a sonata for piano and violin.  Still, fascinating to hear. 

Coupled with this sonata is a small sequence of Bach recordings including the filler for the last side of the Beethoven, and Tovey’s spoken instructions to the listener to ‘repeat from beginning’ so that the exposition repeat could in that way be intact. There is also Tovey’s conjectural completion of Contrapuntus XIV, the last side of the Roth Quartet’s recording of Roy Harris and Mary Norton’s quartet arrangement of The Art of Fugue. Formidable playing and a formidable mind, as we all know. The two final Fachiri recordings are taken from her Vocalion discography and the example from the Third Partita is rather better than the Sarabande from the First. 

Graz-born Marie Soldat-Roeger (her married name) was born in 1863 and lived a long life, dying as late as 1955. As well as her strong Brahmsian credentials she led her own female string quartet and performed up to the end of the First War, though continued to play chamber music in private. Her recordings are among the rarest in violin music and most collectors will never have come across a single one of her 1921 Unions. In fact, so rare are they that three have small chips, meaning that these discs have lost music, though it won’t be apparent when listening, other than shortened playing time. 

These recordings throw up challenges. What, if anything, can they tell us about the Joachim School. I’ve always remembered the words of the opinionated American writer and performer, Henry Roth, a violin guru (self-appointed, of course) who called her recording of Bach’s Air a ‘soporific bore’. I don’t find it so and he can’t have been listening properly and was undoubtedly prejudiced against her kind of tonal production, much favouring the shiny Russian School. Yet it’s true that her very limited use of vibrato would have struck him as appallingly retrogressive, and her whole ethos offers an affront to modern ideas of tonal production. Her legato, meanwhile, is finely deployed and the playing for one in her late 50s is technically accomplished.

I have more problems with the movement from Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.5 where her tonal thinness is not especially attractive and the lyric section duly suffers. Valuably for posterity though, she plays Joachim’s cadenza.  Her performance of Beethoven’s Romance in F is unusually deft and though once again it’s largely devoid of any vibrato it’s a convincing recording. The Adagio from Spohr’s Concerto No.9 is always held up as an opportunity to investigate late nineteenth-century performance style, given that she had been a pupil of August Pott, himself a Spohr pupil. It’s clear her spiccato is intact and her technique is in good order. Does it tell us anything? Hard to say. Certainly, hard for me to say but if it’s the case that it teaches us anything it’s surely that a lack of vibrance and expressive commitment were endemic in her Spohr performances. Surely that can’t be right, or if it is, that can hardly be a good thing. Perhaps Roth was right after all.

Her Schumann has rather more personality than her Spohr – she had moved in the Brahms-Clara Schumann orbit for a number of years – and the final examples of her art, unfortunately from chipped copies, are of the Prelude and Largo from Bach’s Third Partita. The Prelude is especially revealing of her use of rubato; it’s lithe and impressive in its own way.

These Union discs were reissued on a Master of the Bow LP 40 years ago with the same chips, I believe, and I assume that all these recordings – LP and CD – come from the collection of the Dean of British violin collectors, Raymond Glaspole, who has presented flat transfers which Rick Torres has remastered. The full notes are by Tully Potter. 

There’s a case to be made for the restoration of all the d’Aranyi-Fachiri recordings but until we get them (if we ever do), this select look at Fachiri’s discography will have to do. The Soldat recordings, imperfect or not, are very welcome and whilst possibly historically contentious they are, in every sense, very valuable. 

Jonathan Woolf 

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Contents

Adila Fachiri (violin) and Donald Francis Tovey (piano)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Violin Sonata No.2 in A major, BWV1015: Andante (c. 1720-23)
Violin Partita No.1 in B minor, BWV1002: Sarabande (c.1720)
Violin Partita No.3 in E major, BWV1006: Gavotte en Rondeaux (c.1720)
Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940)
Completion of Contrapuntus XIV; Art of Fugue (1931)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Sonata No.10 in G, Op.96 (1812)
rec.1925-35, London

Marie Soldat-Roeger (violin) and Otto Schulhof (piano)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, BWV 1068: Air (c.1730)
Violin Partita No.3 in E major, BWV1006: Prelude and Largo (c.1720)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Violin Concerto No.5 in A, K. 219: Allegro aperto (1775)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Romance No.2 in F major, Op.50 (1798)
Louis Spohr Op. 55 (1784-1859)
Violin Concerto No.9 in D minor, Op. 55: Adagio (1820)
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Abendlied, Op.85 No.12  arr Wilhelmj
rec. 1921, Vienna