Music: Szigeti on the Air

Tall, lean, balding Joseph Szigeti (rhymes with spaghetti) is not the silky-slickest violinist in the world (Jascha Heifetz is), nor the velvety-mellowest (Fritz Kreisler is). But for flawless taste and all-round performance, Fiddler Szigeti gets the votes of most critics, fiddlers, composers, fastidious concert-fanciers. The 15 years, on & off, that Szigeti has fiddled in the U. S. have given him a taste for such U. S. diversions as listening to swing and the radio. Last week radio "jaywalkers"—as he calls dial-twiddlers—had a chance to hear Szigeti.

Newark, N. J.'s Station WOR hired him for a series of Sunday-night half-hours (Mutual network) of purest Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, with an orchestra conducted by WOR's Music Director Alfred Wallenstein. Never before, thought Director Wallenstein, had a single station presented a series of such high calibre.

Joseph Szigeti was born 48 years ago in Budapest. Fiddler Jenö Hubay taught him; Fiddler Joseph Joachim, the 19th Century's greatest, pronounced him a comer. He made his debut at 13. Szigeti has spent most of his musical life in London and Paris—where he had to leave most of his possessions in a bombproof shelter.

Joseph Szigeti's favorite game is listening to the radio, labeling compositions and performers. Sharp-eared, sharp-minded Szigeti has had some notable successes, as checkups proved, in identifying a player's background (a violinist was "a pupil of a pupil of Auer"), or guessing at a lady-pianist's love-life (none).

A friend of Jazzman Benny Goodman, with whom he plays clarinet-violin-piano works by another friend, Modernist Béla Bartók, Fiddler Szigeti says of jazz: "It has raised the standards of efficiency in playing music. It is much easier to get away with a slovenly performance of Poet and Peasant than with a well-written jazz piece. Jazz brought to popular music what the impressionist brought to painting —more colors and more care in using them. I think jazz has sharpened the receptivity of the listener."