With great delight, I am steadily working my way through four hours on four CDs of Walter Gieseking playing Debussy (a truly incredible bargain from Regis, with the complete set costing only something like £12). The recordings were made by EMI during the period 1951-4 and sound extraordinarily good, since the piano is much more tolerant towards digitised “old” sound compared with the violin. And the performances are beyond praise; Gieseking's delicate touch and light and shade come through faithfully, but he also gives Debussy's music real backbone, unlike many of the somewhat effete performances one hears elsewhere. Difficult to imagine why anyone bothered to record this music after Gieseking over half a century ago.

A different kettle of fish comes with Miroslav Vilimec playing the fourth violin concerto of Jan Kubelik. I was not aware that Kubelik wrote any violin concertos until I received this from my friend Ronald. This is a live performance from 1994 and the music is interesting. Kubelik had a talent for thematic material (evident in many of the short pieces for violin that he wrote). Here the music reminds me of the Viennese Korngold, crossed with bits of Mahler. I enjoyed it, since the violin, although having lots of “virtuoso” passages, also sings lyrically in many places. A concerto to come back to. The other work on the CD-R, the Op 23 violin concerto by Heinrich Ernst played by Lukas David, sounds much more conventionally “virtuoso” compared with the Kubelik concerto. I much prefer Jan Kubelik.