Cuts made clear

IN his brief review of Joshua Bell’s new recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto [“Aural Histories, the Next Gen: Blooms in a Warmer Climate,” Feb. 26], Chris Pasles wrote that the brilliant and popular American violinist “may be the first musician to open up all the traditional cuts in the last movement.” He isn’t, not by a long shot.

The first performer of the piece, Adolph Brodsky, certainly did not make any cuts in it when he premiered the concerto in 1881. The cuts as we know them were introduced later by Leopold Auer and were observed by most of his pupils.

My teacher David Oistrakh, on the other hand, as well as most of his younger Russian-trained contemporaries, usually played the concerto without any cuts, mostly because in the Soviet Union, molesting such a sacred cow was considered dangerously unpatriotic.

In the mid- to-late 1980s, Itzhak Perlman, followed by a few other Western-educated violinists, started opening some and sometimes all of the cuts as well, while at the same time many violinists based in Russia went in the opposite direction and, encouraged by a less repressive environment in their country, began using the cuts to express their newfound freedom.

These days, one might encounter performances and recordings of the piece all over the globe with or without cuts, with just about equal frequency.

MARK KASHPER

Los Angeles

Kashper is a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.