Music: Brother & Sister Act

They walked onto the Carnegie Hall stage hand in hand, as they had so often in the past. At first, in the Brahms Sonata in D Minor, they played a little tentatively, feeling their way with care. But by the time they got to Bartok’s Sonata No. 1, the violin was soaring with impassioned assurance and the piano was spinning a lacy web of sound. After a fine performance of Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major, the two performers joined hands again to take their smiling bows. Occasion: a joint recital of Violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his pianist sister Hephzibah, after a twelve-year absence from the U.S. musical scene.

Although Yehudi, 43, is the more famous of the Menuhins, there is plenty of evidence that 38-year-old Hephzibah shares his gifts. An infant prodigy like Yehudi, she was discouraged by the family from following a concert career, but was allowed to play occasionally with her brother in teen-age recitals that astounded critics with their power and perception. When she was 18 she married Lindsay Nicholas, brother of Yehudi’s wife Nola, and retired with him to a 24,000-acre sheep ranch in Australia. Hephzibah returned briefly to the U.S. and European concert circuit in 1947, carefully scheduling her tour, she explained, so that she would be back in Australia “in time for the lambing season.”

Now remarried (she was divorced from Husband No. 1 in 1954), Hephzibah lives in London with her sociologist husband and sometimes goes for weeks without touching the piano (“I don’t believe in too much music”). But when she and Yehudi met in Paris for a concert two years ago and first tried the Bartok Sonata, they “sailed right through it; we astonished even ourselves.”

Hephzibah is still not tempted, she insists, to seek a concert career, but she enormously enjoys playing with Yehudi: “If we’re in a good mood we tell each other the music as though we’d never heard it before. It’s like when spring comes. It’s always the most beautiful spring you’ve ever seen.”