Rhythm is one of the most fundamental aspects of musical performance. ‘It is an integral part of formal, textural, harmonic and melodic considerations. Musical rhythm may be viewed as a combination of objective temporal segments (pulse) and emotional sequence’. [1] The rhythmic habits of violin performance have changed greatly in the twentieth century. To the contemporary listener, the early twentieth century recordings may sound rhythmically strange. This is due to a number of factors: the adoption of faster maximum tempos; different varieties of tempo rubato which include not only detailed flexibility of tempo, but also accentuation through lengthening and shortening individual notes, and the dislocation of melody and accompaniment.

Although these habits are generally avoided in modern practice, there is no doubt that performers from the early twentieth century tended to have much more individuality and were more concerned with their own creativity. This is well demonstrated in a review by the British critic Neville Cardus of Huberman’s performance of the Brahms violin concerto in the 1940s:

His treatment of figuration was beyond praise.  Seldom have I heard Brahms’s knotty broken-passage sequences played with so much meaning as Huberman got out of them now.  There was no mere marking time in these passages until the next stretch of lyrical song.  The figuration was vital in every note, and its freedom gave wings to the musical imagination, so that the return to melody seemed almost a curb to imagination, because of the melody’s need for a steady and logical order of notes.