It doesn’t.”I admit that this reaction surprised me, especially considering that Menuhin hails from an age when musicians habitually took liberties with the scores they played. And yet when he first played for me, I noticed an unconscious effort to `say’ something through the music. But that’s not how it should be, this `listen to me, I’m doing something very special’. He studied with Louis Kentner [Menuhin's brother-in-law] – in fact, he’s had the best musical upbringing possible. Here was an extremely wilful personality, one who treated the principal cadenza in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto as a fully fledged musical epic – broadly, emphatically and with a whole host of rhetorical gestures. Menuhin was obviously fascinated; but did he actually approve of Joo’s interpretative freedom? He thinks for a moment “He’s a very talented pianist,” he says; “I admired him. But perhaps his highest priority at the moment is teaching the young, mainly through the Menuhin School.

When asked if he has revised any of his founding ideals, his reply is simple but profound: “I am protecting my world of faith, trust, beautiful music, communication and compassion against a world which so often seems to defy those values.” He sees endless potential in the individual and has nurtured much talent through the School, not least the young Polish-born violinist Rafal Payne, the BBC’s latest Young Musician of the Year, with whom Menuhin has just been touring in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto.Of equal interest was the appearance, at last week’s London concert, of another Menuhin School pupil, pianist R Hyung-Ki Joo. “You make me feel as if I ought to be wearing a long white robe!”A week before his 80th birthday, Lord Menuhin (American-born, a British subject since 1985 and a member of the House of Lords since John Major put him there in 1993) is as busy as ever in his many roles as conductor, educator, musical evangelist and festival organiser. When I play the Euro Hymn, I play it more like a prayer.”Menuhin’s consternation at persistent political and social misdemeanours runs through our conversation like an idee fixe. Comments such as “We live off each other’s sicknesses” or “We are all criminals and I am a criminal…

because we are producing people who have a grudge against society” shoulder in among a plethora of musical references. He believes in heredity: “After all, we can’t escape it, can we? And the risk of heredity is no greater than choice by election, by appointment, or by lottery!” Yet he can also be gently self-deprecating, as when his publicist excuses the collapse of a planned joint book-signing with Lady Menuhin (the former ballerina Diana Gould, who has herself just published her own volume of autobiography, A Glimpse of Olympus) by pinpointing the danger of Yehudi’s upstaging Diana. Beethoven doesn’t so much deal with individuals as with the whole of society He is a prophet, a painter But prophets are often exceedingly uncomfortable. No one enjoyed being with Beethoven for too long.”Does that perhaps explain why today’s audiences often seem more comfortable with Beethoven’s company in short bursts, or “sound bites”? Yet there are problems inherent in “sampling” such great scores. “Take the Choral Symphony,” says Menuhin – “a world, no, a universe in itself.