Daniel Hope: My Tribute To Yehudi Menihun

 

A heartfelt tribute to his longtime mentor and family friend, Yehudi Menuhin.

Daniel Hope says: "Yehudi Menuhin is the reason I became a violinist. As he used to say, I fell into his lap as a baby of two."

"For my parents, life in 1970s South Africa had become intolerable, marked as it was by that tragedy mingled with farce, so characteristic of the appalling apartheid regime. We lived in Durban, where my father co-founded the literary magazine Bolt, publishing poems by writers of many races. From that moment on, his phone was tapped and my parents were placed under permanent surveillance. They had no option but to leave the country, but my father was only offered a so-called exit permit. This meant you could leave but never return. My parents settled in London, where very soon their money ran out. We had nowhere to go. At the eleventh hour, facing a calamity, we had some incredible luck: an employment agency offered my mother a compelling choice of jobs: secretary to either the Archbishop of Canterbury or to the violinist, Yehudi Menuhin. She chose Menuhin, and their association lasted 24 years until his death."

"Our life changed immediately and forever. For the next years, I grew up in Menuhin’s house in Highgate, London, where my mother would take me every day to play, while she worked. Menuhin was a wonderfully spontaneous man. He’d leave his Guarneri del Gesù in an open violin case on the table, he never put it away. He picked it up and played it, almost as if he were drinking a glass of water. He once told me: “One has to play every day. One is like a bird, and can you imagine a bird saying ‘I’m tired today, I don’t feel like flying’?” The violin was a part of him. To this day, his sound remains in my ear, so unique and so fascinatingly beautiful."

For his tribute, Hope has created a portrait of Menuhin in sound, choosing works written for or closely associated with him. We have Elgar, Mendelssohn, Bartok and Gypsy works by Enescu and Knumann. Hope says: " There’s hardly a passage in all of these great works where I don’t stop for a minute and think of Menuhin."

 

Here is a short trailer for the CD: