Yehudi Menuhin at the BBC Chamber Music at the BBC

ORCHESTRAL ACCOMPANIMENT BEGINS

Yehudi Menuhin was the iconic violin virtuoso of the 20th century.

In this programme, we'll see and hear some of his greatest

performances, drawn from the BBC television archives.

From the drama of Beethoven...

..and the charm of Mozart...

..to his classic appearance on Blue Peter.

That's most unusual, I don't think I've heard that piece before.

It's a curiosity.

There are duets with Stephane Grappelli.

And we'll be talking to his biographer,

former TV producer Humphrey Burton.

Yehudi was like a bird.

You don't expect a bird not to fly, birds fly every day

and musicians make music every day.

And that's what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world.

I'm at the BBC studios in Maida Vale in West London.

It was here in April 1943 that Yehudi Menuhin made

this recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto.

He'd been flown in by the RAF from North America

especially for the occasion.

A hazardous journey across the wartime Atlantic.

It was an eagerly awaited occasion.

The broadcast helped cement his relationship with Britain

and with the BBC.

In the years after the war,

as television grew in its power and importance,

Menuhin became one of its most recognisable musical faces.

Born in New York of Russian Jewish parents,

he was an astounding musical prodigy.

He made his debut at the age of seven.

Albert Einstein heard him and remarked,

"Now I know there is a God in heaven."

Another admirer was the English composer Sir Edward Elgar.

He conducted his Violin Concerto

with the 16-year-old Menuhin, who later became a British citizen.

An intensely spiritual and humanitarian man,

he played for the survivors of the Belsen concentration camp

after five years touring with Allied troops.

Wherever he went, he spoke about music

as if it were a civilising force.

And he somehow gave music a sense of dignity and a sense of purpose,

which in this world full of hype, is not always the case.

The 1950s saw him at the height of his powers,

as here, performing his favourite work, Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

In 1960, he was at the BBC giving a Sunday recital which included

a work he'd studied first with his beloved teacher,

the Romanian composer George Enescu,

Cesar Franck's Violin Sonata.

He'd recorded it first with his sister Hephzibah in 1936.

A quarter of a century on, they were back performing it together.

Good night.

Menuhin was 11 when he made his New York debut

playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

Dressed in a pair of velvet knickerbockers,

he gave a performance which, in the words of one contemporary critic,

"Takes away the breath and leaves you groping tirelessly

"among the mysteries of the human spirit."

It was a work that he was to return to again and again.

Playing it for soldiers during the war,

at the opening conference of the United Nations,

in a devastated Berlin, with Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting.

And here at the BBC, in a studio performance

with the London Symphony Orchestra, and an energetic young Colin Davis.

When did he really become a household name in Britain?

I think the time when he really got under the skin of the general public

in this country was in the late '50s,

when he started to live here with his second wife.

She finally insisted that they move to Europe.

And they lived in a lovely house up in Highgate.

And he was on the radio in the Brains Trust,

and he was playing concerts on television and broadcasting

and giving concerts at the Albert Hall, he was a very familiar figure.

And in a way he was, for the general music loving public,

he was Mr Violin.

These days you probably think Heifitz or Kreisler,

but in those days, Menuhin was the name on everybody's lips.

It coincided with the violin.

Next, some rare broadcasts from the 1960s.

Back then, most television programmes were transmitted live.

The only way to save them for posterity was literally

to point a film camera at the TV screen.

Hence the picture quality is at times a little ropey.

But the sound is excellent.

And as for the quality of the musicianship,

well, judge that for yourself.

I love Bartok and I think he's perhaps...

certainly one of the greatest of our composers of our day.

And because I knew him - I knew him during the last two years

of his life in New York - he wrote the Sonata for Violin alone for me.

And because his style speaks of a background which, as Enescu's,

has always been, for me, irresistible.

It speaks of thousands of years, of generations back.

Its origins come from so far away.

And they have continually fertilised our culture

and I think Bartok is perhaps the crystallisation

of this interchange of cultures.

Yehudi Menuhin is going to play the last movement

of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor.

APPLAUSE

Did he like being on television?

Did he like the atmosphere in the television studio,

the lights and the cameras pointing at him

and the need to do things over and over again?

Yehudi was supremely unaware of the technical side of television.

He'd been in the recording business since he was a boy of nine or ten.

They first came out to his home in San Francisco

with recording equipment for the RCA record company.

That side of things he took for granted.

He wasn't in the least bit self-preening.

He didn't require a mirror to look at how his make-up was

before he went on screen and things like that.

What you got was what he was. He was the same off as he was on screen.

And presumably he realised that television gave him

a fantastic opportunity to reach out to the broadest possible audience.

I do remember that we all thought that Yehudi was good for a strong interview.

We'd have him on the Monitor arts programme whenever we could.

He'd be singing the praises of Indian music.

He discovered Indian music when he toured India in the '50s

and then he wanted the whole world to enjoy the music as much as he did.

And he played it and he stood on his head in front of the cameras.

I think he conducted a symphony orchestra in Germany once

standing on his head. Can you imagine?

Bah-bah-bah-bah! Close the legs. Bah-bah-bah-bah! Open the legs.

I will play for you now the Prelude from the E major Partita by Bach.

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

Over the years, Menuhin must've introduced millions of viewers

to the delights of Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Bach.

But in the early 1970s, he revealed a very different side of himself.

When he worked with Stephane Grappelli,

which is something Michael Parkinson and his producer made happen,

he was fulfilling a childhood dream.

When he'd heard Gypsies playing when he was ten years old,

living in Romania for the summer with his teacher, Enescu,

he met the Gypsies, heard them play

and he longed to be able to improvise the way they did.

He thought he was a clos... He wasn't.

In fact, he didn't have very much of the improvisatory instinct.

He needed to have the dots in front of him.

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

When did you first become aware of the existence of Stephane Grappelli?

About ten years ago

when a friend of mine gave me some records of Stephane Grappelli.

I had never heard a jazz fiddle before

and I was completely overwhelmed with his extraordinary facility,

technique, imagination, fantasy, rhythm,

and this is the first time we've met.

I've been looking forward to this for ten years.

It's a great compliment for me. Thank you very much.

Stephane, when did you first come across Mr Menuhin's work?

Well, I know Mr Menuhin when he was very young.

The first time I saw him

he was about 15 or 16 when he was the most talented young violinist.

Do you think that music can be a real power for good in the world or

that it is never any more than a kind of pleasant pastime for the listener?

I think it is a formative influence,

especially on those who make it themselves.

But one has to be very wary of putting too much faith in any one activity.

Nothing can replace a good heart and a sensible head

and I've known some of the best musicians who are spontaneous,

where we know even some of the pop groups

who make music and make some good music

-and nonetheless are people who have ruined their lives.

-Yes.

So I would hesitate to lay down the rule

and say that music is the great redeemer.

It is an extraordinary thing and, I think, the most wonderful of arts.

For my taste and those of my friends and audience,

it is one of the great inspiring elements in life.

But to say that if only people played music

they would be better or there'd be no wars, I'm not sure of that.

Menuhin was always happy to proselytise on behalf of classical music

and would take any opportunity to reach out to a wider or younger audience,

as we see in this appearance on Blue Peter.

MUSIC: BLUE PETER THEME

This violin is 370 years old and it is a piece of musical history.

It was made by a very famous family of Italian violin makers called Amati

and, at one time, it belonged to one of the most famous violinists there's ever been -

Niccolo Paganini -

and he was 13 years old when he gave his first public concert.

But this boy was only six years old when he gave his first concert.

That was in America in 1922 and his name is Yehudi Menuhin.

Mr Menuhin has very kindly come along to the Blue Peter studio today

-straight from his latest American tour. Hello, Mr Menuhin.

-Hello.

Delighted you could come along because we knew you were

the one person to be able to tell us more about Paganini's violin.

First of all, it seems to me it is a very small violin.

It is just under a half-sized violin, I would imagine,

and it must have been a thrill for Paganini to have received

such a beautiful violin at that age and to be able to work on it.

Do you think you could still play on it now?

Well, I can do the trick that Paganini did very ostentatiously

when he used to cut off the three upper strings

and only play on the remaining G string.

And he'd go way up.

Which was an unusual thing to do in those days.

-It still has a pretty good sound.

-It is a very sweet sound.

-Yes.

And, as Mr Menuhin said, he's going to play Paganini's version

of an operatic aria called Nel Cor Piu Non Mi Sento.

He's playing the melody

and accompanying himself with the left-hand pizzicato.

That's most unusual. I don't think I've heard that piece before.

It's a curiosity. Of course,

Paganini is much better known for the Theme to the 24th Caprice.

It goes like this.

Lovely. Thank you very much for sparing time to come along today.

-Thank you, I've enjoyed it.

-It's been a great thrill for all of us.

Wonderful to hear Paganini's music played so beautifully.

Did you get a sense from him that he was happiest as a soloist,

as a man out the front, or was he actually more interested

in a more collaborative form of music-making?

It seems to me that Yehudi is a universal musician.

He'd grown up in a great tradition of solo virtuosos.

He could play all the great concertos before he was...

Or almost before he was in his teens.

He notoriously played Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in one concert

and for the encore played half the Mendelssohn.

That kind of, "I do my thing and I do it better than anyone else."

That is one side of him.

But also, as his career developed, he became far more of a conductor.

I think, in many ways, a much better conductor than he is given credit for.

Certainly, he loved making music with his friends.

APPLAUSE

Watching this archive, you get a sense that he was very happy

with his lot, he wasn't laid low by the angst that can afflict

some people blessed with the talent that he had.

I think that was Yehudi's gift,

that he gave off this air of assurance,

of quiet spirituality.

I'm not sure that, deep down, he was as comfortable

with himself as you may guess.

First of all, he was deeply concerned with the lot of the underprivileged,

the races that didn't have a state, the Gypsies.

And then of course he was deeply worried about education

and his own school was a beacon of what should be done.

I think that his gift was that he managed to,

in his own personal life, stay positive.

He'd been like that ever since he was a boy,

he was always positive and always looking forward

and always using music

as, not a retreat, but simply the natural place where he lived.

He said it was like a bird. You don't expect a bird not to fly.

Birds fly every day and musicians make music every day

and that's what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world.

As a boy, did you feel

that you'd actually received a call, in a way, to be a musician?

My father wanted to play the violin and never succeeded

because he was discouraged.

Brought up by a very orthodox grandfather in Jerusalem

and told that it was a rather frivolous pursuit.

But his heart and soul longed for the violin

and my mother was very musical

and every Jewish family coming out of Russia,

escaping from the pogroms or otherwise,

almost invariably carried a violin case

so you could say that the call was there and I followed it

but I wasn't aware of anything more than that I wanted to play the violin.

Do you believe in a God, as such?

I believe in a...universal power which is...

which integrates everything,

all the elements, all of life, inorganic, organic,

and there is this universe which hangs together on basic laws

and that we will never know the mysteries which are all around us.

To finish this celebration of Menuhin at the BBC,

we find him once again with his friend Stephane Grappelli.

The occasion is Grappelli's 80th birthday concert.

Menuhin himself was past 70,

but their vitality and energy is still exciting as ever.

APPLAUSE