Kyung-Wha Chung, Sir Georg Solti, The London Philharmonic Orchestra, Béla Bartók ‎– Bartók Violin Concerto No. 2

This recording of Bartok's Violin Concerto, dating from 1976, was seminal in my catching the collector's bug. Until then I knew Bartok's Concerto through the famed 1953 recording of Menuhin-Furtwängler (Violin Concerto 2, on a cassette tape poorly transferred from the LP), and decided to try this new one. I didn't like it. But then, I decided to try and understand why. I didn't read scores then, so I painstakingly made an A-B comparison, phrase after phrase, juggling back and forth with the two cassettes. I didn't go further than the first movement, but came to the conclusion that Chung-Solti were in fact BETTER than Menuhin-Furtwängler, not only on account of their better sonics, but also because they had an extra bite which I recognized as truly Bartokian, as opposed to the gentler and mellower Menuhin. And I realized that my initial reaction derived simply from the fact that I had become used to the sonic perspective of the earlier recording, and acoustically enslaved to a given interpretation, confusing it with the composition. I decided that this should never happen again, and that when possible I'd buy multiple versions of one work, so never again to confuse the composition and the interpretation.