Word: menuhins
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Perhaps in this undertaking, as in so many others, Yehudi Menuhin is the exception, Violinist par excellence, condunctor, music educator and humanist fervently committed to causes as diverse as Amnesty International and organic foods, Menuhin is one of a handful of classical musicians whose world-wide fame promises to endear his recently published memoirs to a public beyond devoted specialists. But for those expecting either a pristine dissertation on performance or a spicy self-revelation, "Unfinished Journey" will be a disappointment: it is above all a book about people, ideas and music and is only secondarily the thoroughly polite exposure...
...Menuhin is more reticent about the private events of an adulthood spend in the public eye. He writes cryptically, and with ovbious pain, of his hasty first marriage and subsequent divorce ("Each of us had married an illusion...There was nothing in my past to teach me how to cope with failure"). He speaks warmly, and with a tinge of regret, of his four living children (a fifth died at birth)--"as a father I have probably spend less time with my children than any man not sentenced to life imprisonment." And no amount of reserve can hide his delight...
...more importantly, there is the music. Noting with characteristic humor that "it is a feature of the violinist's career to burst abruptly into view...like Aphrodite washed ashore on Cyprus, beautifully complete, and often younger than she," Menuhin makes clear that his own career had less exciting origins. At two, his parents smuggled him into a matinee of the San Francisco Symphony; at four, unappeased by a toy violin ("this travesty of my longings enraged me"), he acquired his first instrument; by the time he was twenty he was an established master on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Menuhin demonstrates that the process was overwhelmingly influenced by a succession of teachers, from an initial incompetent or two ("to teach vibrato, Anker would shout 'Vibrate! Vibrate!' with never a clue given as to how to do it") to the inspired and inspiring tutelage of his beloved Georges Enesco ("I know that everything I do carries his imprint...
Violinist Yehudi Menuhin first performed there as a prodigy of eleven; Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein once played piano in its dance studios for $1 an hour. Last week both were back at Carnegie Hall, along with the New York Philharmonic and a contingent of famous colleagues, for a fund-raising gala to celebrate the hall's 85th anniversary. Among the performers: Violinist Isaac Stern, Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who had come to play at his first nighttime concert in 35 years. The program, which cost up to $ 1,000 per ticket...