Americana?–well yes, but chunks of this repertoire wouldn’t have figured on my essential wants-list of American works for violin and piano. And there are some unpardonable exclusions, like William Kroll’s “Banjo and Fiddle”, and the perennial “Hoe-Down” from Copland’s ballet Rodeo, of which several transcriptions exist for these instruments. But it’s impossible to please everyone with a compilation like this, and to some extent neglectful programming is off-set by the verve of the performances.
Leila Josefowicz draws chiefly on Heifetz and Perlman transcriptions here. It’s all familiar stuff, but I’m not always convinced she’s aware of the pitfalls of pastiche, and occasionally, as in the suite from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, you feel she tries too hard to match Heifetz’s inimitable finger substitutions and glissandos–and it doesn’t quite come off. Josefowicz sounds best when she’s at her most spontaneous; that’s why the most satisfying playing here is of Vieuxtemps’ Yankee-Doodle variations, a work she confesses in her booklet article to have discovered only recently, and thus assimilated into her repertoire without stylistic preconceptions or inhibitions. So take this disc at face value and you’ll definitely enjoy it. Expect too much of this program at a more cerebral level and it probably won’t outlast more than a couple of hearings. The least interesting Josefowicz disc to date. [4/8/2001]
