"From the Inside Out"

Standing in front of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the slender, highbrowed violinist found "my fingers cold . . . getting weaker and weaker." He was "submitting to an ordeal by fire in front of some half-hundred string players . . . come to . . . rehearsal with a decided 'show me' attitude." That December day in 1925, young Budapest-born Violinist Joseph Szigeti showed them--with the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

Since then, Violinist Szigeti, world-traveled and world-famed, has endured many another ordeal by fire--including such unforeseen ones as his recent detention on Ellis Island on re-entering the country he has made his home for nearly a decade (TIME, Nov. 27). A greying, philosophic man of 58, he has survived them all. In Carnegie Hall last week, he played a unique concert to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his harrowing U.S. debut.

Master's Touch. With Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting members of his New York Philharmonic-Symphony, Szigeti gave his sell-out audience four works for violin and orchestra--and nothing else, a rare program for the U.S. (though not for European audiences). He opened with the clear, forthright Corelli suite La Folia; then came the Brahms Violin Concerto, followed by Portrait No. 1, an early work of his late Hungarian compatriot and friend Bela Bartok, and finally the Beethoven Concerto.

Facing most often toward Conductor Mitropoulos, playing with the orchestra rather than in front of it, Szigeti again proved himself a master musician. Among the warm and thrilling tones there were occasionally irritating and unviolinlike sounds--scratching, coarseness of tone, a nervous, whining vibrato. But, as he had been showing U.S. audiences for a quarter of a century, Violinist Szigeti could still produce music with an impact seldom reached by many a more spectacular technician.

In Remote Corners. For Violinist Szigeti, that has been the goal ever since he went to England as a young man and his work with Composer-Pianist Ferruccio Busoni caused "the scales to fall away from my eyes." He concentrates on trying to play a composer's music "from the inside out" instead of putting a "superficial" gloss on it. Though he has a reputation for struggling painfully to prepare every concert, he actually practices very little. Says Szigeti: "Visitors always seem to find me in my shirtsleeves when I have finished 25 minutes of practice, and think I have been working for hours."

When he is not touring, Szigeti lives quietly with his wife Wanda in Palos Verdes, Calif. He is just as eager to discover new music as he was in the '20s, when he introduced such works as Prokofiev's Concerto No. 1 and Roussel's Second Sonata and was soundly rebuked by many critics at the time. He is just as eager to discover new old music, for that matter. "Nothing would please me more than to find a lost Mendelssohn sonata," says Violinist Szigeti. "Digging into the remote corners of music keeps one bright and shiny."

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