Paganiniana

Nathan Milstein was a violinist of such integrity - comparable in this respect to Heifetz and very few others among his contemporaries - that it is not easy to think of him writing a display piece like Paganiniana. The evidence is there, however, both on disc (in a somewhat make-shift recording of his Library of Congress recital in 1946) and in print (in a score published in New York in 1954). Milstein also made a transcription of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, incidentally.

The starting point of Paganiniana is, not surprisingly, the 24th Caprice in A minor, which has attracted the interest of so many other composers and which here becomes the base for impulsive excursions in all directions round it. Other Paganini Caprices are featured - the voluptuous tremolandos of No.6 in G minor, for example, or the horn calls in the thirds and fifths of No.14 in E flat major - and so does the First Violin Concerto in D major. In most cases the Paganini material is touched on for no more than a few bars before Milstein develops it according to his own fertile imagination and his own highly developed technique. Apparently episodic in construction, Paganianina survives very happily on its virtuoso inspiration and its spontaneity as a tribute to the greatest of all violinists.