Customer Reviews

Violin of the Century

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A very good documentary indeed.

Menuhin does not only tell you in person about his own pilgrimage into the holy land of music right from his birth: his early routine training, his first schoolday, his first violin teacher, his debut, his success, his experience with the gypsies, jazz, folk music including the Indians everything, ( we have various clips showing how he mixed with them sharing their experience); and he also offers his highly remarkable views on contemporary musicians like Ysaye, Enescu, Adolf Busch, Bartok, Bruno Walter, Horowitz, Kempff, Glenn Gould, Fischer Dieskau, Furtwangler, Fricsay, Karajan... etc., he also very briefly tells you about his views on politics, his feelings for human sufferings and for the poor, and that he is against the provinciality of music; he even tells you about his personal regrets...

No, we don't have a whole concerto here. Instead, we have a dozen or so of short pieces, all sparkling jems, collectors's envy: they are all heart felt music of the highest order, and the sound and photography of them are all as good as one could expect! When he is not accompanied by an orchestra, he is mostly accompanied by Baller or else his sister, a most wonderful pianist. When we come to certain hallmarks of his development where footage is unavailable, we have more recent footage as replacement-- doesn't really matter, for he always sounds the same!

There is also one clip when Menuhin tells us how we could relax the muscle of our left hand with some sort of a demonstration for better vibratos...

This DVD is quite long: over 2 hours, quite enough to cover everything that the audience is interested in. And quality is excellent in every way. Highly instructive and most amusing. Highly recommended.

Maybe the best work on Menuhin, but the people (like me), who expect to see complete recordings will get a bit disappointed. This disappointment is very well compensated by the good documentary nature of the DVD.

Caveat Emptor: All the recordings are mono.