Exclusive: Paris names a Promenade Yehudi Menuhin

Exclusive: Paris names a Promenade Yehudi Menuhin

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norman lebrecht

September 28, 2019

The promenade will be inaugurated on Tuesday by Mayor Anne Hidalgo at Avenue de Lowendal – Place de Fontenoy.

… and London, where the great man lived most of his life, has nothing in his memory.

Typical.

Comments

  • double-sharp says:

    But London’s got a bronze statue of Ronnie Raygun. London knows on which side its bread is buettered.

  • Peter says:

    Naming streets after great people is a nice idea, though somewhat associated with repressive governments.

    What do you think London should do.
    Rename a major street or select a new one in a housing estate somewhere ?

  • John Dalkas says:

    “Typical” you say. Would you care to elaborate?

  • Ruben Greenberg says:

    Good news! There’s a rue Stéphane Grappelli in Paris, so as far as I know, Menuhin will be the second violinist here to have a street named after him. Of course, there are many, many streets named after composers, the most recent I can think of here being la rue Albert Roussel. Would that Beethoven had a proper street named after him and not the 30-yard dreary cul-de-sac that he has here in Paris.

  • Petros Linardos says:

    Always nice to see anything named after Yehudi Menuhin. What was his connection to Paris?

    • The View from America says:

      He took the city by storm in 1927 as a child virtuoso, performing Lalo and Tchaikovsky violin concerti with Paul Paray and the Lamoureux Orchestra. https://www.menuhin.org/the-man

    • Ruben Greenberg says:

      Petros: Menuhin lived in a Paris suburb when he was a child studying with Enesco. His next-door neighbour was the author Boris Vian at the time! He was a Francophone and a Francophile; a frequent visitor to France.

  • double-sharp says:

    Empty gestures like this are all President McWrong can think of. Putting up a few street signs is the extent of his cultural policy, He prefers to spend funds beating and blinding those who dare oppose his jackboot rule.

    I wonder if he will bother to clean Avenue Menuhin – or leave it as the same open sewer the rest of Paris has become during his tenure? Yet he will continue to blame the infestation of rats on ‘migrants and gypsies’.

    If you missed seeing Romania under the Ceausescus, Paris is a reminder of what it was like. Those in the know avoid Paris these days. He might bother to disinfect the streets – but only if he gets a visit from Uncle Donald, and then only along the boulevards along which the motorcade would pass. What a festering dump.

    • Double check says:

      Ah ah you seem a little obssessed by Macron, but it is the mayor or Paris that is in charge of cleaning the streets. And regarding your stupid comparison with Romania, i guess you never heard About George Enescu.

      • double-sharp says:

        [[ i guess you never heard About George Enescu. ]]

        I sat through the first half of his execrable opera “King Oedipus’. Like 90% of the audience, we walked out in anger af the interval. What a charlatan that man was! They chould have taken him out into the garden with the Ceausescus.

  • Edgar Self says:

    An affectionate and fitting memorial to Yehudi Menuhin from the City of Light, where he made some of his best records with his teacher Georges Enescu: Ernest Chausson’s darkly Sibelian “Poeme” for violin and orchestra, and Bach’s double concerto.

    Unusual among musicians, particularly Jewish musicians, of his day, Yehudi and his father Moshe Menuhin came to the defense of Wilhelm Furtwaenglerafter WWWII as early as 1947. Then and in succeeding years Menuhin appeared with him in Lucene, Berlin, and London, recording concertos of Bartok, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Beethoven with Furtwaengler and the Lucerne Festival, Berlin Philharmonic, and Philharmonia Orchestras.

    Mr. Lebrecht recently posted a news item about a new Menuhin School for violin instruction in China. Menuhin was interested in Asia and yoga, and sometimes photographed standing on his head.

  • Edgar says:

    There is only one name allowed at this time in London: Brexit Lane. Everything else is to be punished unto death, according to The Cummings.

    I, for one, would be happy to not have a cul-de-sac named after me…;-)

  • Saxon Broken says:

    We don’t change the street names in Britain. And I think that is a good thing.

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