Must-Have! “Yehudi Menuhin – Yehudi! – The Art of Menuhin”. “Now I know there is a God in heaven!” exclaimed Albert Einstein when he heard Yehudi Menuhin, then just 13 years old, play a concert in Berlin in 1929. That famous anecdote encapsulates Menuhin’s genius as a violinist and the impact he made in the course of a career that spanned a momentous period of history. Born in New York in 1916, he died in Berlin in 1999 — 70 years after drawing such an amazed response from the pre-eminent scientist of the 20th century.
Seventy years was also the duration of his relationship with the record company EMI. Unrivalled in the history of recording, it produced some three hundred discs, now treasures of the Warner Classics catalogue. This collection, Yehudi: the Art of Menuhin, comprises 39 outstanding tracks, carefully chosen to display the many facets of Menuhin’s achievement as a violinist — in concertos, sonatas, chamber music and captivating encore pieces, in music inspired by his friendship with the sitar-player Ravi Shankar, and in partnership with the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli. Menuhin was an enthusiast, a man of enormous musical and intellectual curiosity, a generous colleague and a sympathetic mentor, as well as a man of vision, ideals and determination who believed that music has the potential to change the world…