The Canadian-born violinist Kathleen Parlow was one of the most exceptional violinists at the beginning of the 20th century. A brilliant child prodigy, who had performed before King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace at the age of 14, Parlow was a student of the legendary Leopold Auer, who was so enamored of her playing that he referred to her as ‘Mischa Elman in a skirt’. While a still a student, Glazunov, the director of the St Petersburg Conservatory, recommended that she give the Belgian premiere of his Violin Concerto. While still in her teens, Parlow’s performed with such legendary conductors as Thomas Beecham and Bruno Walter, and was the dedicatee of the Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen’s Violin Concerto. Throughout the 1920s, Parlow gave several world tours, travelling as far afield as the Middle East, India, China, Korea and Japan. However, before she turned 30, she had had enough of life as a travelling virtuoso and decided to retire from giving concerts. She returned to Canada, and she made a career teaching until her death in 1963. 

This 2-CD release features all of the commercial recordings Parlow made for the HMV and American Columbia record labels. Her first records were made at the age of 19 for HMV in which she was guaranteed a special ‘artist royalty’ of 10%, a figure that matched what the company paid the famed coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini. Parlow’s records for the Columbia Record Company in New York were made between 1912-16, and first brought out alongside those of none other than the legendary Eugene Ysaÿe.

CD1 Track 1 Extract Paganini Moto Perpetuo

Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1884, Marie Hall was one of the most important women violinist of the early 20th century. An early fighter for the acceptance of women as soloists, she was born in comparative poverty but achieved enormous popularity in her teens and was the dedicatee and first performer of one of the most popular violin works: The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
	Hall began her serious violin studies under Edward Elgar when she was 10 years old, and moved to London to work with August Wilhelmj. After Jan Kubelík heard her, he helped arrange for her to study with his teacher, the legendary Otakar Ševčík, in Prague, where she made her début 1902 with her teacher’s Amati (also used by Kubelík at his début. A year later, at the age of 18, she appeared at St James’s Hall playing Paganini’s D-major Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Concerto and Wieniawski’s ‘Faust’ Fantasy, with Henry Wood and the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, scoring a sensational success. As Wood recalled: ‘In my mind’s eye I can still see that frail, delicate girl coming on to the platform and can hear her faultless intonation and pure technique.’ The following year, she made her first records for the Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd, which later became HMV.
	At a prophetic concert given in Cambridge in 1909, Hall was first heard by Vaughan Williams who took note of the young violinist, and would eventually write his beloved Lark Ascending for her. In December 1912, after Hall performed Elgar’s Violin Concerto with the LSO under the composer’s baton, the Illustrated London News critic felt she ‘played the difficult solo part...with extraordinary facility’. He did note ‘a certain degree of coldness’, a trait which was apparently one of the few negative features of her playing – she was also sometimes criticised for trotting out the same familiar warhorses in her concerts.
	The Great War caused the gestation of The Lark Ascending to be rather protracted – RVW had pretty well sketched it out by August 1914. Marie Hall was one of those who kept concert life going during the war, nevertheless this fraught period brought her sole concerto recording: the abridged version of Elgar’s Concerto. Although she curtailed her concert activities significantly by the mid-1920s. Her last appearance at the Proms came in 1931, and afterwards she began her regular broadcasts for the BBC, which lasted until just before her death in 1956. 

CD1 Track 1 Extract Paganini Moto Perpetuo

Biddulph Recordings

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