When Yehudi Menuhin started the competition for young violinists that bears his name, it was held in Folkestone. Since then it’s had a peripatetic existence: two years ago it took place in Austin, Texas, but to mark the year of the centenary of Menuhin’s birth it has returned to London for the first time since 2004. This year’s competition began in earnest on 8 April at the Royal Academy of Music, but it launched the previous evening with a concert given by the Philharmonia conducted by Kazuki Yamada, with performances by four previous prize winners.
Though it styles itself as “the world’s leading international violin competition for players under 22”, the list of previous Menuhin winners isn’t exactly crammed with household names. In any concert designed as a celebration, there’s always a tendency towards self-congratulation. So there were some introductory platitudes, and a rather awkward parade of this year’s finalists before the concert began with Yamada’s rather fine, purposeful account of Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture. That turned out to be the highlight of the evening, though there was plenty of fine violin technique on display, and even moments of genuine musical insight, too: Tasmin Little brought lyrical sweetness to the rhapsodic solo line of Gustav Holst’s early, Max Bruch-like A Song of the Night, while Ray Chen launched into Brahms’s Violin Concerto with tremendous energy and intensity, even if it all became a bit too relentless before the end.
Neither of the other two soloists were playing pieces that demanded much of their musicality, though. The winner of the junior competition two years ago, Rennosuke Fukuda, certainly dispatched Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie with every bit of the brilliance it needs, while Jianfeng Chen got to give the world premiere of the solo-violin test piece commissioned for this year’s senior competition from Roxanna Panufnik. Her Hora Bessarabia is a perfectly efficient homage to Romanian Gypsy music in a slow-fast form, though stylistically it would have seemed old-fashioned 100 years ago. But then as the repertoire for this competition seems to pretend that music ended 100 years ago with Prokofiev, perhaps that was appropriate.
• The Menuhin Competition continues until 17 April.
