Yehudi Menuhin. April the 22nd will be the 100th Anniversary of his birth.

[Barbirollians]

I enjoyed it too but frankly he is a subject who deserves more than a rushed hour - lots missed out - his rehabilitation of Furtwangler, his relationship with Bartok and just about his entire recorded legacy.

I agreed with Clemency on overlooking imperfections in his technique in later years . I have come across a BBC Legends recording with him playing the Brahms Double with Rostropovich and the Bach e major with George Malcolm. It includes however a performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the LSO and Colin Davis recorded at the same concert as the Brahms in June 1964 and although there is some wavery intonation it is an extraordinarily moving and interesting performance Worth 100 glitzy slide over the surface accounts.

[Richard Tarleton]

I enjoyed the programme too. Clemency Burton-Hill is rather a good TV presenter. She should do more like this (and less on Breakfast).

She is indeed. I just wish she wouldn't affect the glottal stop

I've only ever owned 3 YM records - Paganini 1&2 (not his sort of thing at all, it was a very early purchase) and Harold in Italy with Colin Davis.....I could have done with a lot more on his playing as Barbs says. The crossover stuff with Shankar and Grappelli reminded me of John Williams the other week - YM and JW having to "learn" their improvisations, the collaborations 100% on the terms of the other artist.

But, the programme was a revelation to me, the monstrous childhood, the effect of WW2....

[Barbirollians]

She is indeed. I just wish she wouldn't affect the glottal stop

I've only ever owned 3 YM records - Paganini 1&2 (not his sort of thing at all, it was a very early purchase) and Harold in Italy with Colin Davis.....I could have done with a lot more on his playing as Barbs says. The crossover stuff with Shankar and Grappelli reminded me of John Williams the other week - YM and JW having to "learn" their improvisations, the collaborations 100% on the terms of the other artist.



But, the programme was a revelation to me, the monstrous childhood, the effect of WW2....

Paganini 1 was very much his sort of thing in the 1930s - his recording with Monteux is stupendous and has never been matched let alone surpassed IMO .

[Richard Tarleton]

Interesting, thanks. It must have been a later attempt I had on LP (bought late 60s), pretty sure it wasn't Monteux or such an old recording.

[Barbirollians]

Interesting, thanks. It must have been a later attempt I had on LP (bought late 60s), pretty sure it wasn't Monteux or such an old recording.

Yes there is an early 1960s recording with Erede - a bit effortful .

Here is some of the 1934

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkNF8lNve38

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Perhaps surprisingly, the most beautiful violin sound in the programme came from Clemency's own playing.

[Barbirollians]

Perhaps surprisingly, the most beautiful violin sound in the programme came from Clemency's own playing.

Did you miss the extract from the Menuhin/Elgar 1932 recording ?

[pastoralguy]

She is indeed. I just wish she wouldn't affect the glottal stop

I've only ever owned 3 YM records - Paganini 1&2 (not his sort of thing at all, it was a very early purchase) and Harold in Italy with Colin Davis.....I could have done with a lot more on his playing as Barbs says. The crossover stuff with Shankar and Grappelli reminded me of John Williams the other week - YM and JW having to "learn" their improvisations, the collaborations 100% on the terms of the other artist.

But, the programme was a revelation to me, the monstrous childhood, the effect of WW2....

May I suggest Menuhin's autobiography 'Unfinished Journey' which is very interesting although, understandably, he glosses over his monstrous parents? (Madame Menuhin would not allow Louis Persinger to criticise the boy and once demanded that he apologise for doing so! I've always laid the blame for Menuhin's later technical problems at her door since she felt that scales and studies were unimportant).

Humphrey Burton wrote a more revealing biography years later and that's well worth reading too.

[Richard Tarleton]

Lunchtime O'Boulez in the current (no.1416) Private Eye tells us that we have the reissue of Tony Palmer's 1991 book and film to look forward to - the Menuhin clan tried to stop publication then, apparently, and the new edition has a "blistering preface" listing "his antagonistic dealings with the family". And there's apparently a "massive, 2-volume biography" by Philip Bailey that was published in Australia in 2010. Publication here was stopped over a copyright issue - he'd referred to papers which the RAM had bought from the family for a figure said to be around £1 but copyright still resided with the family apparently.

[greenilex]

In connection with Menuhin's encounter with the Roma boy to whom he gave his best bow, I have found a wonderful project called Music4Rom which concluded earlier this year.

I had an amazing holiday listening to dance music in a Transylvanian village once.

[Serial_Apologist]

I had an amazing holiday listening to dance music in a Transylvanian village once.

Did you encounter Bartok there?

[greenilex]

I am trying to remember the name of the viola da braccia player who led the village band. Even got a CD, which then disappeared.

[ahinton]

My only direct memory of Menuhin live was the 1991 première (and so far only performance) of Ronald Stevenson's violin concerto. Menuhin had commissioned it way back in the mid-1970s and given the composer no deadline for its completion; in the event, it was finished in 1979. It's one of the largest violin concertos in the repertoire (to the extent that it IS "in the repertoire"), coming in at over 50 minutes, like the Elgar concerto that the young Menuhin had so famously recorded with its composer conducting (although that's about where any realistic comparison ends!).

By the time of the performance, the 75year old Menuhin was already curtailing his playing activities and so decided to conduct it instead and got his only private student, Hu Kun, to play the solo part. Arguably Stevenson's most ambitious conception after his monumental Passacaglia on D-S-C-H for piano, that solo part is quite demanding musically as well as technically (Stevenson himself had played the violin in his youth) and, sadly, Hu Kun just didn't rise adequately to those challenges, his resulting performance being most notable for its diffidence and at times insufficient audibility (and nothing in Stevenson's masterly orchestration risks swamping the soloist); the orchestral contribution, however, was for the most part so sloppy and undisciplined that one would never have credited it as being given by BBCSO had one not known and Menuhin was palpably out of his depth on the podium for some reason (and it has to be said that the other two works in the programme, Vaughan Williams' Wasps overture and Mozart's 40th symphony, each of which BBCSO must have played many times, didn't far a whole lot better for similar reasons). Somehow they all contrived to pull some excitement out of the bag in its final pages but, by then, the overall experience had already established itself as a dispiriting one that fell far short of expectations, especially for a work of its calibre.

Not really the kind of thing that one really wants to recount at the time of Menuhin's centenary, but it would have been dishonest of me to gloss over the shortcomings in his conducting of this piece and, at the same time, a pity not to avail myself of the opportunity of mentioning the work itself, especially as it's never been heard since then - and that was a quarter century ago.

[ardcarp]

String players often make good conductors, because being able to get what you want from string players by talking technical is a big advantage. I always felt Menuhin was excellent in his 'comfort zone' i.e. the Baroque and Clasisical repertoire, but am not surprised at what you say above, ahinton.

I sort of 'grew up' with Menuhin the violinist, because my father was a violinist too, and although 11 years older than Yehudi, he very much revered his (now somewhat dated) style of playing.....so we had all the shellac and vinyl records. I liked Daniel Hope's demo of the Menuhin style...wish we'd heard more of that.

[Conchis]

Wasn't Y.H. a strong supporter of the Tories and a Thatcher loyalist?

That doesn't make a him a 'bad man' in my book - but it does put him among a very small group of people (i.e., right of centre 'high cultural' figures).