David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter play Béla Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 1

Historic live performance from Moscow’s Great Hall: David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter play Béla Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in C-sharp minor, Sz. 75, recorded live on 29 March 1972 at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. This upload presents a carefully remastered version of the original recording, enhancing clarity and presence while preserving the natural bite, weight and dynamic range of the performance.

Composed in 1921 and dedicated to the violinist Jelly d’Arányi, the sonata is one of Bartók’s most demanding and uncompromising chamber works. Drawing on his deep immersion in Hungarian and other Eastern European folk idioms as well as the modernist language of Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Bartók fuses savage rhythmic drive with rhapsodic, improvisatory freedom.

Cast in three large movements – an intense, restless Allegro appassionato, a brooding, nocturnal Adagio, and a final Allegro whose propulsive, “strummed” piano writing and wild violin lines evoke the spirit of peasant fiddling – the work stretches both instruments to their expressive and technical limits.

In this 1972 Moscow recital, Oistrakh and Richter bring together two towering twentieth-century voices in chamber music, captured at the height of their powers. Their performance of Bartók’s First Sonata formed part of a legendary evening that also included Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 2 and Prokofiev’s darkly haunting First Violin Sonata, a program later issued on several historic live releases.

Performers
David Oistrakh – violin
Sviatoslav Richter – piano

Work
Béla Bartók (1881–1945)
Violin Sonata No. 1 in C-sharp minor, Sz. 75 (1921)
I. Allegro appassionato
II. Adagio
III. Allegro

Видео David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter play Béla Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 1 канала Arthur Grumiaux and Friends