On tour with Fricsay

It is ideal when soloist and conductor can arrange for a series of concerts, for instance if they can go on tour together and have time to reach the essential musical truth that each one is striving for. I had thisgood fortune with Ferenc Fricsay. The tour we did together through Germany to Copenhagen, London and Paris will always remain in my memory as a musical and human experience that was both inspriring and touching. I was able not only able to enjoy the complete agreement in our understanding of the works played in my part of the programme, but better I had the opportunity to watch and analyze the extraordinary way in which he dramatised each musical score. Each work became a novel fraught with human passion, with moments of crises and thanksgiving, of joy and agony, all strung together in an continous story, which his imagination wove in greatest detail. He created such drama in his music-making that it seemed to me he would need no other literature in his life.

Once when describing the New World Symphony of Dvorak, he conjured up a vision of immigrants arriving in New York, of their approach to this "promised land", of pinnacles and spires rising out of the mist of their hopes, of their nostalgia and of the heartbreaking experiences, an I realized how important this dramatize was to the impact his interpretations had on the public. Only when the music he brought forth matched the vividness and color of his mind's picture were his emotions appeased; only then did that electric current which he the picture in his mind's eye, were his emotions appeased and only then did that electric current which he generated, strike as only music can, directly on the listener's heart. No wonder that he was such an outstandig operatic conductor, as he approached all music from a dramtic point of view.

These memories are some of the most joyous moments in my musical life.
                                                                                                  Sir Yehudi Menuhin