Joshua Bell - Complete Decca Recordings (2024) {14CD Box Set}

A new-world virtuoso with old-world musicianship: the complete Decca recordings of JOSHUA BELL, capturing the first decade of the violinist’s career on record.

Decca signed the nineteen-year-old Joshua Bell in 1986 on the basis of privately made concerto tapes. Bell had first picked up a violin at the age of four, but he had been taking the instrument seriously for less than a decade. His musicianship and technical aptitude were nurtured and coached by Josef Gingold, a pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe. He made astonishingly rapid progress. Within months of signing for Decca, he had already made his first three albums, of concertos by Bruch, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Wieniawski, and recital encores.

Unfashionably, Bell felt especially drawn to the Wieniawski, which reveals his affinity for older school of violin playing embodied by Gingold, Heifetz – and Fritz Kreisler, the central figure on a hugely successful 1995 recital album. But by then, Bell was already demonstrating the breadth of his musicianship, and striking up partnerships with the pianists Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Olli Mustonen, and the cellist Steven Isserlis. These partnerships would last for decades to come, and yield deeply rewarding albums of French repertoire for Decca, including Chausson’s Concert and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

Bell is now music director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, who accompanied him back in 1988 for that Bruch/Mendelssohn coupling. In a sense, therefore, this new Eloquence box brings us full circle to an appreciation of a violinist who has always taken his talent seriously. He went on to record concertos by Brahms, Schumann, Saint-Saëns, Barber and Walton, and his playing inspired the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis to write a concertante Air which he recorded for Argo. Previously only issued in the US, this Kernis album now joins the violinist’s Decca discography in this new Eloquence box, which is compiled with original album covers and annotated with a new appreciation of the violinist by Tully Potter.