Bach, Händel, Vivaldi, Benda / David & Igor Oistrach

"I was three and a half when my father brought home a toy violin," said the great Russian fiddler David Oistrakh. "I enthusiastically imagined myself a street player, a sad profession quite common at that time in Odessa." But he went on, he said, to become a child prodigy, "boring and without a spark." His own son Igor's violin training took a more conventional path, but to hear father and son together on this CD is to get a whiff of that original, wonderfully liberated Odessan sound. Liberated, but also remarkably disciplined: the tempi are often followed with metronomic precision, and there's no trace of virtuosic affectation. Their Bach is grave, their Vivaldi glowing, and their Handel full of vivid warmth. When they do let rip in the final Sarasate number, it's to dazzling effect. Recorded in the late 1950s, this is a disc to treasure and marvel at: their violins speak as one, in perfect symbiosis of mood and purpose. --Michael Church