Yehudi Menuhin celebrates his 60th birthday on 22 April. For just about 50 of them he has been an HMV recording artist, so when I visited him at his elegant, peaceful home in Highgate, I first asked him to look back across the years to his first-ever sessions in the studio. This turned out not to be a studio at all, but a church; he pointed out to me how the wheel has come full circle, with churches once again coming into fashion as recording venues.

‘I remember it was naturally enough a very great event for an 11-year-old. It was of Ries’s La capricciosa and Fiocco’s Allegro (8/29). Next came Monasterio’s Sierra morena and La Romanesca, an old Hebrew melody (7/32). For the first, I remember it was a very bright Californian day. We went out to a little church, a small, wooden Methodist building. We rode out in a Buick, which proudly displayed a bullet hole in the windshield which was received coming through Texas on the way from the Camden studios. That was 1927, which if you think of it was just about halfway back to the great gold rush west.

‘It was shortly after the introduction of the electrical method, so that I didn’t have to record into the shell. I recall I was awarded by my parents with two things – after all, it was a great day for them, and they had no idea how many records I would go on to make. One was The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the other the first sound film, which came out about then – I forget what it was called – with Al Jolson [The Jazz Singer].

‘The next year I made my first recording with orchestra. That was the Bruch Concerto with Sir Landon Ronald (5/32). From then I knew Abbey Road almost as my second home. The record industry for a while, during the Depression, became centred on London, and afterwards when things recovered in America, many artists went back there, but I remained here. I always prefer to preserve the status quo unless there’s some good reason for changing it, and in this respect, everything always worked out amicably at Abbey Road and elsewhere here, so I stayed. In those days, I worked with Fred Gaisberg and Rex Palmer. My work at that time was really the seed from which grew the setting-up of my home here.’

Soon after came the famous recording of the Elgar concerto with the composer conducting (11/32). Memories are still vivid for Menuhin. ‘It was my first encounter with a gentleman-composer. I had only worked with Bloch before, and he was a wide-eyed, Old Testament prophet. I wasn’t therefore really prepared for this extraordinary, grandfatherly and benevolent character, who couldn’t have been kinder to me. He was a conductor of great calm, who yet could bring out this enormously rich sound and attack from the orchestra. I was overwhelmed. I’d met him a few days before the sessions as a precaution, and I had been through the concerto with Ivor Newton, just before Elgar arrived, at the Grosvenor House, one summer day in July 1932. He listened to me playing just the first few pages, then decided I would do and went off to the races.

‘This was really one of my first encounters with the English approach, which is the opposite, if I can put it that way, to the slogging way, of the determined “I shall conquer” method. I’ve followed it ever since. In a more general sense, I believe that the British musician has a sense of style – more flexible, more aware of subtleties – that exists nowhere else in the world. That comes with having an unbroken history – you lose style as soon as you have a revolution. Revolutions sometimes are unavoidable, tragedies that can’t be helped because of the stupidity of the outgoing, the impatience of the incoming, but they’re always disastrous. Where style is concerned, they ruin it. Nowhere else in the world can you find, as you can in this country, a natural habitat for the whole range of music from Monteverdi to Stockhausen.’

Although Menuhin has made records at Kingsway Hall and other venues, the majority of his sessions have been in EMI’s Studio No 1 at Abbey Road. ‘I think I’ve seen it through all its phases. At one point they covered the walls with curious echo devices. Before that I remember when they tried to turn it into a “dead” place with no resonance whatsoever. These fashions come and go, and each technical advance has its day. At one time, if you could include overtones only a dog could hear and you saw the dog reacting you knew you had reached the last word in recording technique! After all these alarms and excursions, we’ve got back now, I think, to a fairly reasonable middle-of-the-road sound, especially at EMI, and that’s due in no small respect to the good, conservative taste of a wide public. It wants something that’s pleasant to listen to – and no gimmicks.’

When I asked Menuhin if there were works he would like to record again he replied, ‘Yes, all of them. Particularly at this moment I have a lively sense of what I want to do. Each work reveals itself anew to me in terms of what I’ve been through, so that the notes have become bearers of more information, of more importance than they ever were before to me. Whether it be the Beethoven or Brahms, or new works, I’d like to re-record everything I’ve ever done! The point is that one arranges to record a certain work on a particular date. That’s fine – it has to be arranged like that, but there are moments in concerts when something happens, and one wished that that could be recorded for posterity. Technique should be flexible enough to do that. Like all other artists what I look for in recording is the spark, the fire of a real performance. I know most people believe that records today are pieced together from odd bits of tape, but I do really try to keep as complete a single performance as possible.’

What would he still like to put on record that has eluded him to date? ‘Well, there’s a great deal of the chamber-music repertory. One day I would like to have a string quartet, and remedy that, when I get the time. Then there’s the Brahms Double Concerto, which I’ve never made. I’m doing it on 9 May with Rostropovich in the last concert before I take off a sabbatical year, promised to my wife when I reached sixty. I would also love to record the Brahms symphonies. When Karajan fell ill recently, I conducted them all with the Berlin Philharmonic. I was tackling the First and Fourth for the first time.’

Everyone will, I am sure, want to wish Yehudi Menuhin a happy birthday, and will also wish to be with him in spirit on 23 April at the Royal Festival Hall when as he says ‘the oldest and the youngest Menuhin’ – his son Jeremy – will give a recital together. ‘That concert will be in aid of Amnesty and the one on 9 May with Rostropovich will be in aid of his school. ‘I felt somehow that concerts on and around my birthday could not really be put to my private advantage. So I’ve chosen two causes – one, the school which is very close to my heart, and the other which I like to think of as the conscience of humanity.’

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