On a concert tour of Japan in the mid- 1970s, I had to give 25 performances of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in 28 days. What I remember most about that experience is that every time I went on stage, it was as if I was playing it for the first time. This is the quality of a genuine masterpiece: it always feels fresh, each rendition feels like a new interpretation, and you can always find something different to say. It’s what I call the miracle of great music, and there are very few works in the violin repertoire that can be called that.
I also think it’s the most difficult concerto in the literature. I first heard it in 1954 when I was 13; my father brought home a 78rpm recording – which meant we had to turn it over every five minutes – and it was Gioconda de Vito performing in Salzburg under Wilhelm Furtwängler, both huge musical talents. She’s still among my favourite soloists of all time, and I was lucky enough to meet her six years later. When we talked about the concerto, she said what I had always thought: the first page is so incredibly simple that it becomes difficult in its simplicity. Beginning with the octaves and then going into the fantasy on the D major scale, to capture the beauty of the music seems to be so easy, but it never is. De Vito agreed wholeheartedly, and so did David Oistrakh when I joined him on his tours of Italy in the early 1960s, when I’d play for him. I had a great relationship with Isaac Stern, too, and he told me how the thought of that first page would absolutely terrify him, every time he went on stage to play it. Each of these great soloists would tell me how hard they found the concerto, all down to capturing that feeling of simplicity.