Camilla Wicks began violin lessons at an early age with her father Ingwald, a Norwegian violinist and teacher, and at seven was performing concertos in public. She studied at The Juilliard School with Louis Persinger who helped launch her onto the solo stage, but in her early thirties she gave up a sparkling career in favour of her family role. She returned intermittently to playing (helped by Ruggiero Ricci who gave her a valuable instrument) after her marriage ended, but turned increasingly to teaching as the demands of maintaining an international reputation proved very stressful. A degree of perceived discrimination may have fuelled this decision—she especially disliked being referred to as a ‘woman violinist’. In both playing and teaching she was a passionate believer that a fully-mastered technique is the servant of expression, lavishing the utmost care upon every note played. Wicks made important pedagogic contributions to numerous institutions in North America and abroad from the 1960s onwards.

Her repertoire included some lesser-known works and she was active in promoting the music of Scandinavia (where she was particularly popular), giving premieres of concertos by Harald Sæverud and Klaus Egge.

Wicks’s 1953 concert recording of Beethoven’s Concerto with Bruno Walter epitomises her style at this time. She has a warm and impulsive tone, with relatively tight vibrato that occasionally becomes rather too wide. Her Sibelius Concerto of 1952 takes this approach yet further in an intensely personal reading (the work was a favourite of hers and she performed it in the composer’s presence), beginning at a brisk pace and displaying some amazingly powerful high notes in the cadenza. This is not a particularly sophisticated interpretation and her syncopated double-stops in the middle of the slow movement are rather studied, whilst the finale evidences an unfortunate bowing trait also found elsewhere—attacking the onset of notes strongly, but failing to sustain longer notes and phrases, resulting in an inconsistent melodic tone. This said, her artistic sincerity is never in doubt. A further example of this is the heavily-dramatised Bloch Nigun from 1950.

Recordings from the period after Wicks’s first retirement include a dark-hued Bjarne Brustad Concerto (1968) and a rather less successful Walton Concerto (1985) which is somewhat prosaic, with steady tempi, some octave miscalculations in the first movement and a focussed, but dry sound. Overall, Wicks’s strength as a recording artist is in her intensity, but rather too frequently this is achieved at the cost of precision.

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