I encountered the F major Romance in a curious Menuhin
compilation not long ago and remarked that the Viennese classical masters
must have written their music all along in the knowledge that one day
Menuhin would arrive to play it with this pure, noble tone, simple yet
somehow pregnant with spiritual feeling. This Romance is the highlight
of the disc, at least for me. The G major Romance starts with a slight
disagreement with the conductor over the tempo and remains a little
heavy in effect. Is F major more suited to Menuhin’s spiritual depths
than the brighter G major? I now feel I must give voice to a question
which I was prepared to set aside during the F major. Though all performances
known to me adopt tempi similar to those here, they are Romances not
Meditations, they were fairly early pieces written for an Italian violinist
and in both cases Beethoven’s time signature is 2/2 not 4/4. Do they
really have to be so slow? The problem is that, while in the melodic
moments you can get away with it, especially if you have a tone like
Menuhin’s, there are many moments where the violinist is compelled to
play simple scale passages fairly slowly and try to give them a meaning
when perhaps they are only intended to be thrown off brilliantly. I
know Menuhin could make a spiritual journey of the scale of C major,
but all the same enough is enough, especially if you have the two together,
and I’d dearly like to hear some violinist reassess the whole approach.
Another movement that is often taken at a funereal
pace is the first movement of the violin concerto. It’s true that Beethoven
wrote "Allegro ma non troppo", and this time the time signature
is 4/4 not 2/2. However, Menuhin would appear to agree that a certain
mobility and impetuousness, more than we generally hear today, is required.
The conductor seems less convinced.
There have been some odd concerto partnerships over
the years, a fair amount of them from EMI. Constantin Silvestri (1913-1969)
was a Romanian conductor noted for his virtuoso control of the orchestra
and a freely rhapsodic style of interpretation deriving from a wide
palette of orchestral colours. Thus far he may seem to resemble his
compatriot Sergiu Celibidache; however, in comparison with that wayward
giant, his art, however brilliant, lay on the surface and I never heard
it suggested that any deep spiritual qualities lay behind it. His major
achievement may have been, more than his actual performances, his work
with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra which he raised to international
heights, creating a domino effect among the British provincial orchestras
by his demonstration that good orchestral standards were not limited
to London. He was not noted for his Beethoven and so, on the face of
it, there seemed little point in carting Menuhin to Vienna to have him
play under a conductor who was not likely to bring out the unique qualities
of the orchestra. At around the same time Menuhin recorded a Brahms
concerto in Berlin under Rudolf Kempe. Surely this conductor, or Carl
Schuricht, who recorded for EMI in the 1960s in Vienna, would have been
more inspired choices. Or else stay in London and do it with Klemperer,
Boult or Barbirolli (only six years later he recorded the work with
Klemperer and the New Philharmonia).
Still, Silvestri was a fine musician and the opening
tutti goes with a certain majestic dignity. Menuhin’s tone as
recorded in Vienna seems more brilliant than in the Romances and he
also quite often plays sharp. At times this is enough to raise eyebrows
– take the exchanges with the clarinet at the beginning of the Larghetto
– at others it is barely perceptible. It contributes to the impression
that he was in an impetuous frame of mind, for the passage-work which
many – signally Menuhin himself on other occasions – invest with much
inner meaning, is made passionately exciting. All this means that Menuhin
moves Silvestri’s tempo on, sometimes considerably. So the tempi swing
back and forth between them until, in the later stages of the development,
Silvestri realises he isn’t going to get it his way and starts to collaborate.
Beginning perhaps from the famous G minor episode, which is serene yet
still mobile, there is much fine work here.
In the slow movement Menuhin seems again restless at
the beginning, but this time it is he who settles into Silvestri’s warmly
romantic backdrop. Again, the later stages of the movement are the best,
with a deeply felt, expressively inflected yet still mobile interpretation
of the "sul G e D" variation.
In the finale it is the violinist who gives the tempo,
yet Menuhin himself often seems to want to move away from the relatively
grave enunciation of the rondo theme, to which he always returns. As
the years went on (I am remembering a performance in Edinburgh in about
1974) his enunciation of the rondo theme got graver and graver, while
his tendency to run away with the passage work in this movement got
more pronounced too. Here the process is only just beginning and this
is perhaps the most successful movement.
This performance is undoubtedly the work of a great
violinist, but is not quite a great performance. If you can’t take the
"historical" sound of the versions he made with Furtwängler
(Lucerne Festival Orchestra 1947, Philharmonia 1953) and if you find
Klemperer a rather coldly magisterial partner, you might try this, certainly
in preference to the 1981 version with Kurt Masur (Leipzig Gewandhaus)
which documents his more problematic later years. Apart from various
bootleg editions which have been around, one official live performance
has entered the lists – that conducted by his fellow violinist David
Oistrakh (1963 with the Moscow Philharmonic in London, on BBC Legends)
. But part of the fascination of Menuhin was his combination of spirituality
and fallibility, and to that extent all his recordings are essential.
Christopher Howell
Yehudi Menuhin (violin),
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Constantin Silvestri (1), Philharmonia Orchestra/Sir
John Pritchard (2)