The art of the legendary violinist Leonid Kogan is one of the phenomena in the world of violin music that can hardly be confined by any frameworks, definitions or schools. Was Kogan a great virtuoso? Indeed, he was. His recordings of Niccolò Paganini’s compositions and his stage presence that he got the feel of on TV screen not long before his untimely death is just one of the memorable illustrations. What distinguished Kogan’s renditions of virtuoso violin music were his passion and spontaneity combined with the highest technical perfection. Was Kogan a serious and distinctive musician? To answer this question, one does not need to listen to his recordings of Alban Berg’s and Dmitri Shostakovich’s concertos – all that is self-evident. It would suffice to listen to his Paganini once again and feel Kogan give a unique sense and inimitable sound to each note of these rather unpretentious and, above all, worn out compositions. Everything that was the essence of his performance, everything that he wanted to tell us is contained in the sounds he revealed with his famous Guarneri. One has to see the videos of his concerts to see him remain imperturbable even through the most technically complicated spots and at the moments of his passionate lyrical confessions. The great musician was a stranger to outward artistry, effective gestures and playing to the audience. His exceptional seriousness, exactingness to himself, his students and partners – Kogan played with almost all outstanding musicians of the time: Rostropovich, Luzanov, Gilels, Barshai, Oistrakh, Shapiro, Schering, Ivanov-Kramskoy, Karl Richter – made his interpretations sound as if they were carved in stone. However, the compelling logic and exceptional constructiveness of Kogan’s renditions were never an obstacle on the way to feel the making of music text right in front of the audience. Comparing different versions of his recording made through the years, we get evidence that the great musician kept reviewing details and nuances of how he reproduced the text, accentuated the meanings and even changed the habitual tempos.
In 1964, answering a question about his attitude to gramophone recording, Kogan said, “I’m very positive about recording, and I’m confident we should develop our gramophone industry in every possible way… But a recording made anywhere but a concert hall is a tinned product so to say. It is a model, even if it’s almost technically perfect, but it’s still a model. One can use tinned food, too. But I am all for music manifesting itself in a living process of concert performance.” It is no mere chance that the percent of live performances is so big among Kogan’s recordings. As time went by, this ratio only changed towards an increase in the number of broadcast recordings.
Unfortunately, not all of Leonid Kogan’s recordings have seen the light of day. But those known to the public are enough to have a notion of the great violinist’s work and life that began on 14th November 1924 in Yekaterinoslavl (now Dnepropetrovsk) in a family of photographer Boris Kogan and his wife Sofia and ended in a coach between Moscow and Mytishchi on 17th December 1982. He was on the way to Yaroslavl to rehearse his last programme for the Great Hall of the Conservatory. In 1941, when he went to the music school of the Moscow Conservatory where he studied under the great teacher Abram Yampolsky, Kogan made his first recording which was never released because the war began. He resumed recording in 1945 when he was a student. After Kogan won a competition in Prague in 1947, his recordings, then on 78rpm records, already amounted to dozens. Kogan’s repertoire of the time included a great deal of virtuoso pieces that he excluded afterwards. As the artist admitted to the musicologist Vladimir Grigoriev, “Now, as the public’s demand rises, such pieces must inevitably fall away.” His early recordings are all the more valuable and interesting to us. Kogan’s victory at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels in 1951 gave rise to his international recognition and at the same time initiated his recordings with famous foreign musicians that were made when the violinist played concerts overseas and in studios of some of the largest record labels. Kogan’s ensemble recordings with Gilels, Rostropovich and Barshai date back to the same time, that is the 1950s. Those were a quartet by Fauré, trios by Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Schumann and Haydn, as well as duets with his wife Elizabeth Gilels. The recordings of the 1960–70s that imprinted Kogan’s performances who had become one of the world’s most celebrated violinists demonstrate a repertoire of a striking scope – from old sonatas in ensemble with harpsichord to Berg’s concerto, a most musically and technically complicated masterpiece of the New Vienna School; from Paganini’s music for violin and guitar to some very fresh compositions of the time – Khachaturian’s rhapsody and Weinberg’s concerto. The title sheets of these and many other compositions had a dedication to Leonid Kogan.
However, different recording standards that changed more than once during the musician’s forty-year artistic career and a swift development of the recent time in the field of sound media took a bit of Kogan’s imprinted creative image from his fans with every new round of the progress. After Kogan’s death, Melodiya decided to improve that unfair situation and released forty double albums with most of the violinist’s recordings. But only ten years later, at the turn of the century and in the era of CD, Kogan’s recordings were not that easily accessible at least for the Russian listeners. These Melodiya re-releases offer a new digital restoration of all the best and most interesting what the great violinist left to us.
The members of Melodiya’s classical programmes editorial staff wish to express their gratitude to Leonid Kogan’s widow Elizabeth Grigorievna Gilels and his daughter Nina Leonidovna Kogan for their active involvement in compiling the programmes of the series.
Fyodor Sofronov
