Sibelius: Violin Concerto (Oistrakh)

A very long time ago, I saw my then girlfriend's mother heading towards me down the High Street of my home town. She had not clapped her hate-filled eyes on me, and I certainly did not want to look closely into them. So I took the only manly course available to me and dived in through the doors of Woolworth's.

Whilst in there I bought a copy of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, played by David Oistrakh. It was one of the first Compact Discs I ever bought and I was astonished by the quality and the texture of his playing.

I've been a big fan ever since, not least because he saved me from running headlong into The Woman Who Could Have Been My Mother-in-Law; but if I had to choose a favourite performance, it would be of Oistrakh playing Sibelius's Violin Concerto. Above he's giving an incredible peformance of it with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, directed by Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

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