Bruch: Scottish Fantasia; Hindemith: Violin Concerto

Could an LP ever have sounded this good? It seems hard to believe. How could the sound from a piece of plastic carved with a single circular groove possibly be as warm, as deep, as clear, and as true as the sound from this CD? Yet it must be so, for surely no piece of plastic inscribed with gazillions of zeros-and-ones could somehow contrive to improve on the 1962 Decca Kingsway Hall original recorded on half-inch analogue tape at 15 inches per second by producer Erik Smith and engineer Kenneth Wilkinson? Thus, this 2006 JVC remastering produced by Winston Ma and engineered by Paul Stubblebine cannot really be an improvement on the original -- can it? If this disc coupling David Oistrakh's magical and magisterial performances of Bruch's Scottish Fantasia and Hindemith's Violin Concerto is no better than a pristine copy of the original Decca LP, we'll never know, but as things stand, this disc is as close to ideal as is imaginable. Listen just to the last few bars of the Introduction to Bruch's Fantasia -- the physical sense of Oistrakh's ineffably beautiful tone is palpable. The performances themselves are superlative -- Jascha Horenstein leads the London Symphony in a detailed accompaniment for Oistrakh's expressive performance of Bruch's Fantasia, and Paul Hindemith himself leads the LSO in an aggressive accompaniment for Oistrakh's muscular performance of his own concerto -- but anyone with the slightest interest in the art of recording and remastering owes it to themselves to hear this disc.