Oscar Shumsky was born in an era when very young violinists were often proclaimed as prodigies. Leopold Stokowski called him ‘the most astounding genius I have ever heard’ and invited him at the age of seven to play Mozart’s Violin Concerto K. 219 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The same year, Shumsky became Leopold Auer’s youngest-ever student. His early concert career was a busy one, including a performance for Fritz Kreisler in which he played Kreisler’s unpublished Beethoven cadenzas from memory, having heard them only twice before. Kreisler predicted that he would become one of the finest violinists of the century.

Shumsky performed widely as a youthful virtuoso, often with the Philadelphia Orchestra, but tired of repetition and advocated imaginative programming. After his studies at the Curtis Institute and some time as a staff musician with the National Broadcasting Company he was invited by Toscanini to join the NBC Symphony, where he became acquainted with violist William Primrose and violinist Josef Gingold; he thus joined the Primrose Quartet as first violinist. The quartet’s success was considerable, with many concerts and recordings. In 1942 Shumsky left the NBC Orchestra to concentrate on his solo career and to begin teaching, about which he already had firm ideas.

After a period in the US Navy during World War II, when he appeared as soloist with the Navy band, Shumsky returned to orchestral playing. He was a popular choice for studio work, often serving as concertmaster for the RCA Victor Symphony or the Columbia Symphony, and was also appointed solo violinist for the NBC radio network with weekly broadcasts to millions of listeners. He continued teaching (at the Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School, Peabody Conservatory and Yale University) and, in 1959, added conducting to his activities. In this phase of his career, however, he never seemed to attract the attention that his great skills merited; but in 1981, when he performed in Britain for the first time in thirty years, The Daily Telegraph reported: ‘It is not common practice here for audience members to leap to their feet in acknowledgement of outstanding playing and it is a mark of Oscar Shumsky’s achievement at the Queen Elizabeth Hall that so many did spontaneously do just that.’ David Oistrakh regarded him as ‘one of the world’s greatest violinists’.

Shumsky’s recordings testify to a very secure technique and a thoughtful outlook, sometimes surprisingly modern for a player of his generation. His complete unaccompanied Bach recordings and the Mozart violin sonatas, represented here by the D minor Partita No. 2 (recorded in 1983) and the Sonata in B flat, K. 454 (1989) respectively, are stylistically rather questionable from a twenty-first-century viewpoint. The solid, heavy sound in both, and rather literal understanding of dotted rhythms in the Mozart along with a lack of classical phrasing, especially in the slow movement, are now out-dated characteristics. On the other hand, his 1988 recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is clean, majestic and considered, whilst the Ysaÿe sonatas, with their affectionate references to Bach, are played with strength and control in a 1982 recording. Shumsky’s sound shows some variety according to repertoire (such his use of a fast and tight French vibrato in Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 1 as opposed to the more restrained use of the device in Beethoven’s Concerto), but in the main his playing is typical of those surviving members of his generation who played on into the modern era.

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