London, Sunday

This afternoon at the Royal Albert Hall Yehudi Menuhin played the Bach Concerto No. 2 in E major, the Mozart Concerto No. 7 in D major (K 271a), and the Elgar Concerto in B minor.

In the Bach the soloist could but show his accuracy while the spirit of the music was drawn out of the orchestra by Sir Thomas Beecham, the slow movement being overwhelmingly beautiful in its tenderness as interpreted by Beecham and played by the strings, especially the cellos and basses. Why were we not at last given a harpsichord? Its peculiar tang gives the bite that is essential to seventeenth and eighteenth century music; the piano is a woolly substitute, and was accordingly heard only (and therefore too obviously) in the one short continuo passage.

It is no discredit to Menuhin that he was overshadowed by Beecham in this work. He was too mechanical. But what a perfect machine! He is, of course, too young yet to be filled with emotion, and too inexperienced to be able to impart it. As the recital continued it became certain that he has feeling, but, like all children, he needs a coloured work to encourage him to be emotionally thrilled, whereas Beecham could be emotionally thrilling with a penny-plain work if he chose.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester Guardian, 10 December 1932.

The Mozart concerto, with cadenzas, written by Enesco for Menuhin, which was being given its first performance in London, was also superbly played by the orchestra under Beecham and brilliantly played by Menuhin. Toscanini and Enesco have pronounced this work, which was recently rediscovered and first played last winter in Berlin, to be the most mature of Mozart’s violin concertos. Perhaps it is, or perhaps it has been improved and edited, for it sounded somewhat uneven. The cadenzas in the Berlin copy are not, according to Kopfermann, original (as Edwin Evans’s programme note said). Certainly the new Enesco cadenzas are “after Mozart,” but at the end of the first there was an almost audible gasp from the audience - amazed at the confident brilliance with which Menuhin played it.

In the Elgar concerto, conducted by the composer, Menuhin came into his own. Here he was helped to be emotionally dramatic by the music itself, and be played freely, easily, and most brilliantly, as if high harmonics, double-stoppings and figurations were child’s play. Those who are not admirers of the work could not help being thrilled by the soloist’s performance, and those who are can be glad they have heard such a performance of it.

After many calls the boy - unaffectedly and genuinely self-effacing before Elgar as he had been before Beecham - played unaccompanied (Bach, of course) and redeemed himself from his Bach playing at the beginning; music and emotion by now had taken hold of him, and he played like a true genius.

Menuhin will undoubtedly become the greatest violinist known to his generation. That is inevitable. But if he wants to take a short cut he should study music with Beecham, whose intense musical feeling allied to the boy’s intense musical ability would produce a genius such as has seldom been heard. Menuhin appeared to realise this, and probably does, as he knows, what most people in the audience did not, that the orchestra’s brilliant performance was after only one rehearsal.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1932. Photograph: The Guardian

The Prodigy Menuhin

Manchester Guardian, 24 November 1931

The fourth concert this season of the London Symphony Orchestra was noteworthy on two accounts: first, for the reappearance after his sensational debut last year of that remarkable infant prodigy of the violin Yehudi Menuhin; secondly, for Sir Thomas Beecham’s conducting of music by two composers for whom he has not hitherto evinced any marked predilection but seems rather on the contrary to have tried to avoid, Arnold Bax and Sibelius.



Yehudi Menuhin is unquestionably a fine player, and would be considered so even if his age had been concealed and he had been made to play from behind a screen. The purity of intonation, the sensitive and musicianly bowing and phrasing, the faultless left-hand technique - all these are beyond criticism. I consider, however, that he was ill-advised in choosing such a work as the great Beethoven Violin Concerto to display his truly remarkable gifts, for it is a work of which the interpretation calls for qualities of insight and understanding which are inaccessible to one of immature years, demanding a knowledge and experience of life as much as if not more than of mere art. And exquisite though the young violinist’s playing undoubtedly was he failed equally to scale the intellectual heights of the first movement and to plumb the emotional depths of the second.