Six or seven years ago MCA reissued Morini's beautiful performances of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms sonatas with the late Czech pianist Rudolf Firkusny, and a Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto; and Sony issued as part of its Casals Edition her marvelous 1951 recording from the Perpignon Festival of Mozart's fifth and last violin concerto, the so-called Turkish, because of the Turkish-style interruption in the last-movement Minuet. Sony has just released another Morini recording of the same Mozart Concerto, from a live 1959 concert in Salzburg (also included is Mozart's Haffner Symphony and Haydn's Oxford). It doesn't have all the drama or bite of the Casals performance, but it's wonderful in its own discreet way.

"Despite her smoldering temperament," Boris Schwarz writes in Great Masters of the Violin, "her body barely moved when she played; her right arm (held low in the classical manner) was a model of smoothness, yet it was incisive when energy was required; her left hand was a miracle of pure intonation, using a narrow vibrato that never obscured the core of the note, producing a tone of bell-like clarity." I'll say! The liner copy mentions that a few notes into the piece Morini stopped to retune her violin and then began again. That's not here. What we get is only perfection itself.

-- Lloyd Schwartz