"On the subject of fiddling" The Star, 28 February 1890. I was lucky in looking in to hear Joachim at the Popular Concert last Monday. I must first mention, however, that Joachim was never to me an Orpheus. Like all the pupils of Mendelssohn he has seldom done anything with an allegro except try to make speed do duty for meaning. Now that he is on the verge of sixty he keeps up the speed at the cost of quality of tone and accuracy of pitch: and the results are sometimes, to say the least, incongruous. For instance, he played Bach's sonata in C at the Bach Choir Concert at St. James's Hall on Tuesday. The second movement of that work is a fugue some three or four hundred bars long. Of course you cannot really play a fugue in three continuous parts on the violin: but by dint of double stopping and dodging from one part to another, you can evoke a hideous ghost of a fugue that will pass current if guaranteed by Bach and Joachim. That was what happened on Tuesday. Joachim scraped away frantically, making a sound after which an attempt to grate a nutmeg effectively on a boot sole would have been as the strain of an Aeolian Harp. The notes which were musical enough to have any discernible pitch at all were mostly out of tune. It was horrible - damnable! Had he been an unknown player, introducing an unknown composer, he would not have escaped with his life. Yet we all - I no less than the others - were interested and enthusiastic. We applauded like anything: and he bowed to us with unimpaired gravity. The dignified artistic career of Joachim and the grandeur of Bach's reputation had so hypnotized us that we took an abominable noise for the music of the spheres. Corno di Bassetto (George Bernard Shaw) Bach at St. Anne's. - The World, 18 February 1891. Arbos, the Spanish violinist introduced to us by Albeniz, has made no very deep impression on London so far. At his first appearance he tried over the Kreutzer Sonata, and did not seem to think much of it, though here and there a passage evidently struck him as rather good. Then he polished off Bach's Chaconne in D minor very neatly, but in a take it or leave it sort of manner that half provoked the audience to leave it. He is a player of no mean address and general intelligence, this Senor Arbos: but he has no intention of giving himself away to the public or to the composers, and I am afraid that they, being by this time rather spoilt in that respect, will return his coldness. Joachim is back again in much better preservation than he was two years ago. He played the E major Partita at the Bach concert admirably; and at the Popular Concert the night before nothing could have been more enjoyable in its way than the pretty Brahms Trio which he played with Miss Davies and Paersch, whose horn playing is fine enough to raise rents in any really musical capital. Corno di Bassetto (George Bernard Shaw)