Lucifericm Legacy

He was the devil himself, or at least in league with him. He looked like Ichabod Crane done up as Mephistopheles, allegedly spent more time in illicit beds than in his own, was a fabulous showman and died, denying nothing, at 57. Not even Don Juan had such high-powered publicity--but then Don Juan couldn't play the fiddle.

Nicolo Paganini could. According to 19th century writers, Paganini was the greatest violinist who ever lived. His fingers were like steel snakes, his bow arm a saber that sawed through unheard-of technical difficulties. During one performance, swore a Viennese listener, old Lucifer himself appeared beside Paganini, guiding his fingers. His lustrous tone sounded uncannily like the human voice--and no wonder, declared some darkly, for Paganini made his own strings out of human intestines.

Such unearthly skill called for extraordinary compositions to serve as display pieces. Who better to write them than Paganini himself? He turned out a famous Witches' Dance, a series of caprices, sonatas, quartets, variations and five full-scale violin concertos. The pieces hardly challenged Beethoven's, but they were competently constructed crowd pleasers that bristled with the kind of technical bravura in which Paganini gloried--vertiginous runs and arpeggios, contrapuntal double and even triple stops, a fuller range than any violinist had ever attempted of harmonic overtones (the higher-pitched vibrations of given notes, produced by depressing the strings only slightly).

Jetting to Hell. When Paganini died in 1840, many of these compositions --including the third violin concerto --were tucked away in a bank vault in Milan under the care of the violinist's heirs. Other violinists have been trying to get at them ever since. By last year, all the concertos except the third had been released. It was still held by the Paganini family. Last Christmas, Philips Records, aided by Violinist Henryk Szeryng, finally obtained it after ten years of delicate negotiations.

Now, on a new Philips release, Szeryng and the London Symphony Orchestra under Alexander Gibson give the first performance of the third concerto since the last documented performance by Paganini 138 years ago. Jovial, pretty and full of technical traps, the Rossini-influenced work sends the solo violin scampering like the hero of some demonic opera bouffe.

Szeryng brings it all off with dash and finesse, but without quite removing the suspicion that there must have seemed more to it when Paganini played it. "The work," he says, "makes me feel like I'm jetting from heaven to hell at incredible speed." It must be reported, however, that when he performed it in public recently at London's Royal Festival Hall, the devil did not appear beside him.

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