Customer Reviews

Fritz Kreisler Plays Kreisler

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What can I say? Only Kreisler can play Kreisler. Get a discography of Fritz Kreisler and start hunting down everything you can find by this man. You can compare violinists; Heifetz has astounding technique, Milstein's always wonderful, Oistrakh is a favorite of many, Kogan can play anything, etc., etc., etc.. But Kreisler... is a unique personality of the violin. Yehudi Menuhin said of him in his autobiography, there are many great violinists with perhaps greater technique in this area or that; but "Kreisler mystifies me." Bruno Walter, the great conductor, said of Kreisler, "He did not play the violin; he BECAME the violin." and this is true. There is something special about Kreisler that transcends violin playing itself. Something heavenly is communicated by him with his instrument. Transfers from old disks are always of varying quality. Kreisler lived a long time ago and recording techniques were very primitive; but Kreisler even seems to rise above the pops and the clicks. Other artists are drowned out by them but Kreisler soars above them and makes one forget they are there. You're focused on the beauty and the background noise seems to disappear entirely. Other violinists have tried
to play Kreisler and perhaps get the notes right, most notably among them, Zino Francescatti (who plays Kreisler better than any other man except Kreisler), but only Kreisler can play Kreisler.
If you want to hear it best, put up with the background hiss. It's worth it. If you want a modern recording, see if you can find Francescatti's tribute album to Fritz Kreisler. it's OOP, but an LP in mint condition sometimes appears on an online auction service. Why the Francescatti album ever went OOP I do not know. He is the only modern violinist that ever really tapped into the soul of 'Fritz' when he plays Kreisler. If the disk is ever again released, snap it up before it goes OOP again. In the final analysis, modern violinists, at most, will give you a representative selection of only about 16 tracks and usually you get the worn chestnuts over and over again. Enough of Kreislers own recordings are still available that you can still get the whole gamut of his discography if you just look. Do so!

No crap...really? OF COURSE THIS RECORDING IS A TRANSFER! YOU THINK THEY HAVE DIGITAL RECORDING TECHNOLOGY BACK THEN???? Man, that review from Delaware annoys me.

Go with the first review. This recording is a must. It is one of the great violin recordings. Even my old violin teacher advise me to play some of Kreisler stuff to improve techniques. Kreisler is a legend. Lesson and appreciate the beauties of the violin.

Sometimes the author isn`t the best performer of his own works. That`s not the case. I completely agree with the previous reviewer: yes, only Kreisler can play Kreisler.
While listening to this music you so wounderfully feel the spirit of the old Vienna, that most technically perfect record couldn`t compare with this impressions. Treat surface noise of the records made in 1912-1946 as the scent of that distant time (by the way, nearly the age gone) - and you would be completely satisfied, because the playing by Kreisler is so scincere and soulful. So if you like Kreisler - don`t think twice. This is CD for you.

I love these historical recordings--they give us a chance to study the performance practices of the Masters. Kreisler was a genius, and his refined playing is something that should be listened to by the players of today. They can learn much from his example.

Last summer I had several nights of terrible insomnia. I turned on the FM classical music station; something I don't do very often. They played several selections from this CD. Both the compositions and the performances were unforgettable. After receiving and listening to the cd, all of these are excellent compositions well performed.

This is a collection of Fritz Kreisler recordings going as far back as 1910. 1910! You might call those recordings Lucky to Have Any Fidelity. Yet you can hear performances that almost certainly don't exist in any other form.

So these do indeed sound like 78 rpm records played on a 78 record player. The transfer engineers disclaim any attempt to use "Radical methods to eliminate all surface noise...." My own experience with using equalizers is that it is usually better to "leave it flat" or as is.

Some of the comments indicate that people are bothered by it; I suppose young people who have only listened to digital recordings. If you only listen to perfect recordings, you will miss 90 per cent of the best music performances ever recorded, no matter the category. Just imagine people in the 1920's buying their first record player and hearing Kreisler's Liebesfreud while sitting on their sofa and thinking: could life be any better than this?

Probably the most definitive collection of Kreisler's music put on cd. Remarkably good sound quality considering the era in which these recordings were made (early 20th Century). Kreisler was maybe the greatest violinist since Nicolo Paganini. The power of Kreisler's fiddle even pacified the sinister Ty Cobb (the most feared baseball player during that period, who sharpened his spikes before games to run down and shred the flesh of opposing players). Yes Cobb hauled around a phonograph on road trips, and spent endless hours alone being entertained by Fritz Kreisler in hotel rooms. A small but marvelous treasure for anyone who appreciates the majestic energy of music. All is well.

Interesting because of its authenticity, i.e. Kreisler himself playing his works, but due to the age of many of the recordings the sound quality is not good--many selections very "tinny". Worth having nevertheless.

The music is a lot of fun, and it is also interesting to hear Kreisler himself play it. All the same, despite the remastering, it's a really old recording. I'm glad to hear it sometimes, but it's also nice to hear many of these works in modern recorded sound, which is here: The Kreisler Album: Joshua Bell Plays Music By Fritz Kreisler.

When I was a little girl we had an album of Fritz Kreisler playing his own music. They were on the old 78rpm records. Eventually they all ended up broken. The young folks won't remember those day, but records would break just like a piece of delicate china if they were sat upon, or dropped. Kreisler was a very gifted performer and composer and it just doesn't get much better than this. He was Austrian and my father told me that his popularity waned during and after the 2nd World War because of that. This was unfortunate because music and war are antithetical. There can be no war in beautiful music and musicians rarely are sympathetic to those kinds of views. They're musicians, first, last, and always. This is an opportunity to that doesn't present itself often in the classical music realm: an opportunity to hear the composer's own interpretations of his own music. It's a beautiful album.

I bought this CD about a week ago to replace my old LP recording of Fritz Kreisler which I have owned for decades, but somehow turned up missing from my collection. What a joy this CD is! Kreisler playing Kreisler as only he can do. What is really impressive is that these are the original 78-rpm recordings from as far back as 1910! In fact, all but 4 of the 23 recordings were made between 1910 and 1929, and their fidelity is amazing when considering the limits of the technology during that period. His musicianship soars through the surface noise of those old 78's. It's all about listening to the master, not the technology. However, I did reduce the surface noise of the recordings in order to enjoy his playing even more.

The producers of this CD very wisely minimized the amount of processing in order to preserve the content of the original recordings. They transferred the 78-rpm record masters to digital tape and removed almost all pops and clicks that may have existed. However, as they said ..."Radical methods to eliminate all surface noise have not been used in order to preserve the full-frequency content of the original recordings." Thus, the purchaser of this CD is free to use sophisticated signal processing techniques to remove the surface noise, if he is so inclined, and accept the tradeoff between noise reduction and loss of music quality. Actually, I have done just that, using a program called Wave Repair, and have had good results. Surface noise is essentially gone from the recordings, without affecting the music. Equalization was not used much since these older recordings are limited mostly to a 300 - 3000 Hz range, and drop off rapidly in frequency response outside of that range. A few of the tracks improved a bit to my ear, using low-end equalization.

The bottom line is: get this CD if you love listening to Fritz Kreisler!