"You ask me to tell you something of my own musical preferences. Well,
take the concertos. I have reached a point where the Mendelssohn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Brahms concertos seen to sum up what is
truly worth while. The others begin to bore me; even Bruch! Paganini,
Wieniawski, etc., are mainly mediums of display. Most of the great
violinists, Ysaye, Thibaud, etc., during recent years are reverting to
the violin sonatas. Ysaye, for instance, has recently been playing the
Lazzari sonata, a very powerful and beautiful work.
"My experiences as a 'concertmaster'? I have played with Weingartner;
Saint-Saëns (whose amiability to me, when he first visited this country,
I recall with pleasure); Gustav Mahler, Tschaikovsky, Safonoff, Seidel,
Bauer, and Walter Damrosch, whose friend and associate I have been for
the last twenty-two years. He is a wonderful man, many-sided and
versatile; a notably fine pianist; and playing chamber music with him
during successive summers is numbered among my pleasantest
recollections.
"In speaking of concertos some time ago, I forgot to mention one work
well worth studying. This is the Russian Mlynarski's concerto in D,
which I played with the Russian Symphony Orchestra some eight years ago
for the first time in this country, as well as a fine 'Romance and
Caprice' by Rubinstein.
"Is the music a concertmaster is called upon to play always violinistic?
Far from it. Symphonic music--in as much as the concertmaster is
concerned, is usually not idiomatic violin music. Richard Strauss's
violin concerto can really be played by the violinist. The _obbligatos_
in his symphonies are a very different matter; they go beyond accepted
technical boundaries. With Stravinsky it is the same. The violin
_obbligato_ in Rimsky-Korsakov's _Schéhérazade_, though, is real violin
music. Debussy and Ravel are most subtle; they call for a particularly
good ear, since the harmonic balance of their music is very delicate.
The concertmaster has to develop his own interpretations, subject, of
course, to the conductor's ideas.