Listen but Don't Look

When Russian-born Violinist Tossy Spivakovsky made San Francisco sit up and take notice a year ago with his blazing performance of Bela Bartok's Violin Concerto (TIME, Jan. 26, 1948), critics and music lovers wondered if he could keep up the pace. Fellow violinists said that Tossy had made the difficult Bartok concerto his own, but that playing the classic concertos might be a different story. Since then Tossy has proved that Bartok is just one well-done chapter in his concert book.

Since October, he has played in 56 U.S. cities and gotten rave notices in all of them for his Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Mendelssohn. Last week, his powerful playing of the Tchaikovsky concerto had a usually unemotional Houston subscription audience shattering tradition and applauding after the first movement. At the end, he was recalled five times in the biggest ovation of the season.

Most listeners find it hard to decide what it is about 39-year-old Violinist Spivakovsky's playing they like most. His technique is flawless, and his tone is big and humid. Some wonder if he gets both his tone and technique by holding his bow-arm elbow so high; orthodox violin teachers tell students who go to his concerts: "Listen but don't look." Wherever he gets it, Tossy's violin has power.

A softspoken, self-effacing man (after his performance in Houston last week, he took a seat in the audience to listen to Efrem Kurtz conduct a Schumann symphony), Tossy is one of the few top U.S. concert violinists who have risen from orchestra ranks.

He studied in Berlin as a child, and even made a concert debut, but he stopped taking lessons when he was ten. When the Nazis came to power, he went to Australia on a tour and stayed there, giving concerts and perfecting, among other things, his high-elbow bowing technique. In 1941, he came to the U.S., got a job as concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra--and gave the Bartok concerto its U.S. premiere. When Cleveland's Conductor Artur Rodzinski took over the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in 1943, he asked Tossy to play it again. That was the beginning. His performance left the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson "a little gasping. One is not used to this kind of work from violinists."

Now Tossy finds a few minutes to teach his blonde daughter Ruth, 10, his special brand of fiddling. But as for Ruth having a fiddler's career, Tossy says "too strenuous for a woman, at least our little woman."

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