Joseph Fuchs was undoubtedly one of the longest-serving musicians of the modern age, continuing to teach until a few weeks before his death and giving recitals until he was well into his nineties. Following a recital in the Carnegie Hall in 1987 a critic of The New York Times reported: ‘His playing betrayed the inevitable depredations of age. But at times it was still beautiful on absolute terms, and as with some other honored veterans, it was possible to hear through the imperfections the toughness of mind and passion of spirit that made him what he once was.’

Unlike many of his generation who made substantial careers in the USA, such as Jascha Heifetz and Toscha Seidel, Fuchs was not an immigrant violinist but was born, educated and based all his life in New York where he made his debut in 1920. The famous critic Harold Schonberg complimented him for his ‘complete mastery of the instrument’ and David Oistrakh, upon Fuchs’s visit to the USSR in 1965, described him in equally glowing terms.

Fuchs was a prolific recording artist over a long career. It seems fitting to represent his output with the Sonata (recorded 1951) by Walter Piston, with whom Fuchs had a close association, selections from his complete Beethoven sonata cycle with Artur Balsam (1952) and two astonishingly assured live performances from a recital in 1974.

In many ways Fuchs’s playing sounds idiomatic of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Players trained during the 1950s to 1980s will find his tough stance, with ever-present vibrato and a steely, hard-edged invulnerability (still very much in evidence on record in his 74th year!), typical and in some senses not unusual. This is the style that most will associate with the highest echelons of violin playing in this period, before the emergence of more historically-aware approaches, especially to eighteenth-century repertoire.

Fuchs’s playing shows relatively little stylistic distinction between epochs and works: his nineteenth-century performance (as in the Beethoven and Fauré works here) is, taking account of the very different times of his life at which they were recorded, very much of the modern cast. Martinů’s Sonata for Two Violins (an appropriate selection, given that Martinů’s 3 Madrigals for Violin and Viola were written for Fuchs and his sister, Lillian) and Piston’s Violin Sonata wear this style more fittingly, perhaps, to twenty-first-century ears. Nonetheless, the fact that Fuchs’s stylistic traits are very familiar to modern listeners bears testimony to his enormous influence as one of the most enduring teachers and players of the twentieth century.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Milsom (A–Z of String Players, Naxos 8.558081-84)