The music recorded here derives from an hour-long CBC
television programme recorded in October 1965 and broadcast the following
year. To acknowledge what was recorded is also to consider what was
not. Gould had suggested to Menuhin Mozart’s Piano Sonata K570 – in
the apocryphal version for violin – as well as sonatas by Brahms and
Beethoven and those by Prokofiev and Strauss if his original plan of
the Schoenberg Phantasy should prove inimical to the violinist. In the
event he needn’t have worried because Menuhin accepted (though with
clear misgivings about the work). Sometimes Menuhin hit prime form with
unlikely keyboard partners – one thinks of his New York association
with Wanda Landowska for example – and Gould was equally not an obvious
associate, even though he had worked equably with Menuhin’s colleague
Oscar Shumsky.
There was clearly however a considerable rapport and
a degree of sympathy between the two musicians – to which the letters
and comments reprinted in the notes attest (though they don’t reprint
the rather more bantering comments Gould made about Menuhin then and
subsequently). This led to subtly harmonious performances in which both
managed to retain independence whilst conforming stylistically to the
dictates of each of the three works performed.
I think the critical consensus admires the Beethoven
most but I like the Bach. I find the tension generated between Gould’s
détaché articulation and Menuhin’s cantilena most fruitful.
The pianist’s staccato independence and the violinist’s more obvious
level of communicative and romanticised intimacy are especially notable
in the third movement Adagio but elsewhere one senses Menuhin responding
to Gould’s aesthetic, very slightly shortening phrase endings in the
second movement Allegro for example. They thus generate great depth
of feeling through such disparities as exist and it remains a most intriguing
meeting between two great Bach exponents. Beethoven’s last sonata the
G Major is another case of juxtaposition of approaches but one that
I feel works less well. Notwithstanding Gould’s clarity of articulation
in the opening movement it’s not didactic but rather exploratory of
the structure and harmonic implications of the movement yet it somehow
emerges as sounding rather slow and unanimated. Gould again is adept
at left-hand pointing in the slow movement where Menuhin occasionally
overindulges vibrato usage but the finale is again really rather slow.
Gould’s phrasing is neutral, under-inflected in the poco allegretto,
lacking in generosity in the adagio espressivo, and Menuhin sounds slightly
harassed in the concluding presto section. The Schoenberg is a ten-minute
fractious piece that belies its name unless Phantasy is correlated to
fantastic or phantasmagoria. For all his misgivings Menuhin learnt it
in a day and came fully prepared to the studio where Gould, a practised
exponent of the piece, brought exceptional reserves of power and intellectual
sinew to it. The violinist responded with some highly virtuosic and
committed playing.
The Gould Anniversary Edition – he would have been
seventy this year – is in an open-out cardboard affair and the cover
features a fractured still from that televised CBC concert (back to
front unfortunately). There was nothing fractured about the meeting
of these two musicians however and if I find the performances uneven
this was still a meeting of historic status and of lasting value.
Jonathan Woolf
Yehudi Menuhin, violin