I am posting a wonderful performance of Schubert’s piano trio No. 1 in B-flat major. Schubert began composing the piano trio no. 1 in 1827, the year before his death, and worked on it simultaneously with the song cycle Die Winterreise.
Robert Schumann said of it: “One glance at Schubert’s Trio (Op. 99) and the troubles of our human existence disappear and all the world is fresh and bright again.” The Trio is suggestive of things to come in the genre – composers such as Brahms and Dvořák would go on to write piano trios in a similar, intimate vein. And although the Op. 99 Trio is now one of the most revered chamber works in the classical repertoire, it was never performed publicly during Schubert’s lifetime.
Yehudi Menuhin
April 22, 1916 – March 12,1999
Yehudi Menhuin, Baron Menuhin, OM KBE was an American-born violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in Britain. He is widely considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century.
Early life and career
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City to a family of Belorussian Jews. In late 1919 Moshe (Menuhin’s father) and his wife Marutha (née Sher) became American citizens and changed the family name from Mnuchin to Menuhin. Menuhin’s sisters were concert pianist and human rights activist Hephzibah, and pianist, painter and poet Yaltah.
Menuhin’s first violin instruction was at age four by Sigmund Anker (1891–1958); his parents had wanted Louis Persinger to teach him, but Persinger initially refused. Menuhin displayed exceptional talent at an early age. His first public appearance, when he was seven years old, was as solo violinist with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1923. Persinger then agreed to teach him and accompanied him on the piano for his first few solo recordings in 1928–29.
When the Menuhins moved to Paris, Persinger suggested Menuhin go to Persinger’s old teacher, Belgian virtuoso and pedagogue Eugène Ysaÿe. Menuhin did have one lesson with Ysaÿe, but he disliked Ysaÿe’s teaching method and his advanced age. Instead, he went to the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, under whose tutelage he made recordings with several piano accompanists, including his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Adolf Busch.
World War II musician
Menuhin performed for Allied soldiers during World War II and, accompanied on the piano by English composer Benjamin Britten, for the surviving inmates of a number of concentration camps in July 1945 after their liberation in April of the same year, most famously the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He returned to Germany in 1947 to play concerto concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of reconciliation, the first Jewish musician to do so in the wake of the Holocaust, saying to Jewish critics that he wanted to rehabilitate Germany’s music and spirit.
Hephzibah Menuhin
May 20, 1920 – January 1, 1981
Hephzibah Menuhin had a stellar career as a pianist and human rights activist. Menuhin was fluent in seven languages and gave her first piano recital at age eight. She and her brother Yehudi performed internationally and won the Candide prize for their music. Menuhin’s parents pressured her to marry, so she briefly put aside her career to settle down, but the marriage ended in divorce and she returned to performing. Menuhin visited Theresienstadt and was moved to begin working for human rights. In 1955, she married sociologist Richard Hauser and they founded the Institute for Human Rights and Responsibilities and began running a human rights refuge out of their home in England. In 1977 she became president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Early Life and Family
Hephzibah Menuhin, a pianist and social activist, was born in San Francisco on May 20, 1920, the second of three children. Her parents, Moshe and Marutha (Sher) Menuhin, were Russian Jews who came to the United States by way of Palestine. Neither Moshe nor Marutha was a trained musician, but all of their children—Yehudi, Hephzibah, and Yaltah—showed extraordinary musical gifts. Moshe was a student of mathematics and a Hebrew teacher before he gave his full time and energy to managing his son Yehudi’s career as a violinist. Marutha also taught Hebrew before she devoted herself to rearing her family. Hephzibah’s education, like her brother’s and sister’s, was entirely entrusted to her parents and private tutors. She studied piano with Judith Blockley and Lev Schorr in San Francisco, Marcel Ciampi in Paris, and Rudolf Serkin in Basel. She was also an accomplished linguist, having mastered Hebrew, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian by her teen years.
Performance Career
Menuhin’s debut recital, at which she played works of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, and Weber, took place in San Francisco in 1928, when she was eight years old. In 1933, she and her brother recorded the Mozart Violin Sonata in A. This recording won the Candide prize for the best recording made in France that year. The prize money was donated to charity. The next year, Hephzibah and Yehudi began to perform together, giving one concert in Paris, one in London, and one in New York. Reviewers were in agreement that Hephzibah’s talent as a pianist equaled that of her world-renowned virtuoso violinist brother, but the Menuhin parents were determined that Hephzibah’s public appearances would be strictly limited. Her mother told an interviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, “Hephzibah yearns for solo recitals and a career of her own…. I tell her that the only immortality to which a woman should aspire is that of a home and children.” The youngest Menuhin child, Yaltah, also a skilled pianist, did not perform publicly in her youth at all.
First Marriage and Australia
The Menuhin parents were less vigilant in protecting their children from early marriages to people with whom they were only slightly acquainted. In 1938, when Yehudi was twenty-two, Hephzibah was eighteen, and Yaltah was sixteen, all three Menuhin children married. These marriages all ended in divorce. Hephzibah’s husband, Lindsay Nicholas, was the son of a millionaire Australian analgesic manufacturer and the owner of a 24,000-acre sheep ranch. His sister, Nola Nicholas, was Yehudi’s first wife.
Hephzibah spent most of the 1940s in Australia, rearing her two sons, Kronrod and Marston, and concertizing. She liked to perform with chamber groups and with orchestras, and was a persuasive advocate for contemporary music, introducing, among other works, the Bartok piano concerti to Australia. In addition, she founded the first traveling library in Australia to bring works to the Outback. In 1947, after a hiatus of almost a decade, she once again began concertizing with her brother. They gave a series of concerts in Israel in 1950; they also performed together in many cities in the United States and throughout Europe
Activist Work and Legacy
After World War II, Hephzibah’s marriage to Lindsay Nicholas ended. She married Vienna-born sociologist Richard Hauser and their daughter, Clara, was born in 1956; the family later moved to England. With her husband, Hephzibah worked to assist the poor, the homeless, and those recently ill. She also worked for the causes of peace and disarmament, serving as president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Hephzibah Menuhin died at age sixty in 1981, after a long battle with cancer. Her legacy of recordings includes performances of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Franck, and Enesco. She is also remembered for her devotion to the needy and suffering.
Maurice Gendron
December 26, 1920 – August 20,1990
Maurice Gedron was a French cellist, conductor and teacher. He is widely considered one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century. He was an Officer of the Legion of Honor and a recipient of the National Order of Merit. He was an active member of the French Resistance during World War II.
Maurice Gendron began music lessons on the violin with his mother, a performer for silent movies. At five he switched to a quarter-size cello and at ten was taken to a recital by Feuermann by his teacher Stéphane Odero; although he idolised Feuermann from that moment, Gendron’s family could never afford to take up the master’s offer of lessons. Even when he took a place at the Paris Conservatoire he had to sell newspapers to fund his expenses, and lived in unheated lodgings.
After World War II (during which he joined the Resistance, being unfit for military service) Gendron met Britten and Peter Pears in Paris; this led to his solo début in London’s Wigmore Hall, accompanied by Britten, in which he shared the bill with Pierre Bernac and Poulenc. The same year, 1945, he gave the European première of Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Walter Susskind. He also played trios with Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin and recorded Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with them in 1964. Like most eminent performers Gendron also taught; much of his pedagogic material was collated by one of his pupils, Walter Grimmer, and published after his death as The Art of Playing the Cello.
Gendron’s playing represents some of the most refined musicianship of the mid-twentieth century, testifying perhaps to Feuermann’s influence.