20100519: Tribute to Yehudi Menuhin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-iuSgXKUcw&feature=related

Yehudi Menuhin performs Beethoven violin concerto, in 1962 at the International Concert Hall, with the London Symphony under Colin Davis. 

This version takes me back to my introduction to this great violin concerto, listening to it on vinyl.   Since then, I have learned to love Menuhin, as a great man and as a modern artist. You either love him or hate him. Some judge his later work as technically inferior to his juvenile acheivement, but I think this is dumb. He wanted to get away from technique as an artistic end, to play the instrument without artifice, to make it real.  He was a modernist in the age of expressionism, and was interested in the rough edges, taming them, relishing each discovery, tearing sounds out of the violin that had had never been heard before--at least, not on the polished boards of great concert stages.  

To judge his virtuosity by strictly technical standards is inappropriate, there is more to art than that, and Menuhin dared to go beyond his own limits, to explore new ground, just as Dylan did in going electric.

Those who judge his later work by his early standards are wrong to judge by that, he rejected those standards, according to his own judgement, which ought to be respected. He may not be to everyone's taste, but that kind of judgement is a matter of taste, after all. Children who dislike spicy foods because their own taste is restricted, should not be allowed to govern other's fare.

Menuhin offended pretensions, and affronted musical prejudice, as fits a great artist. His performance of Bach's Ciaccona strikes me as the audio equivalent to Picassos' Guernical, a protest against the inhumanity of war.  And his gesture of playing under on a Berlin stage still reeking from crimes against humanity-- especially so under Furtwangler, who was universally snubbed as a pariah for conducting in Berlin throughout the war-- is to me a moving demonstration of his own great humanity,   revealing the full measure of Menuhin the man, as well as artist.