Yehudi Menuhin 100

The culmination of a year as artist-in-residence at the Yehudi Menuhin School.

Reviewed by David Montgomery, Julian Johnston and Zamira Menuhin Benthall

In London we are privileged to be steeped in cultural life constantly drawn to the galleries and concert halls.
 But rarely are two art forms blended together to celebrate the young emerging talent that will captivate the next generation of concert-goers.
The Yehudi Menuhin School centenary celebration did just that at the A&D Gallery in Chiltern Street later transferring to the school itself in the early part of July for the Menuhin 100 Festival. In the gallery sketches and paintings of the children by artist Geraldine van Heemstra were exhibited as the young Menuhin players performed.
 Observers commented that the movement of the performers were reflected in the gestures portrayed in the paintings. In sketches where the performer’s face was partly obscured teachers and parents recognised the player by his or her distinctive physical technique in the portrait.
 The event repeated through the week at the Chiltern Street gallery was a joyous affair recognising the often unsung devotion of those supporters, teachers and parents of a far-sighted institution established by one of the world’s great twentieth century musicians.
 Presenting the talent of the pupils in music and painting emphasizes and fulfills the enduring need to promote supreme quality in the arts.

David Montgomery (newspaper executive) 

CENTENARY EXHIBITION – A REVIEW BY ZAMIRA MENUHIN BENTHALL

Geraldine van Heemstra’s exhibition in the Menuhin Hall of 75 paintings, drawings and prints, the fruit of her residency at the Yehudi Menuhin School, Stoke d’Abernon, Surrey, was a highly effective backdrop to the Summer Festival successfully organized by the School to celebrate the centenary of Menuhin’s birth in 1916. It is also raising funds for the School’s development appeal, since all proceeds of sale are given by the artist. Geraldine’s portraits of students at the School, aged between 8 and 19, together with a few portraits of staff members and group scenes, combine an exhilarating technical inventiveness with an ability to evoke in two dimensions rhythm, movement and individual physiques. The result was a unique representation of the life of the School, and anyone who has purchased one of Geraldine’s works will own an attractive reminder of this important year in the School’s history.

Zamira Menuhin Benthall, July 2016

‘MUSIC ON CANVAS’ – A REVIEW BY JULIAN JOHNSTON

An artist can’t capture music on canvas, or paper, or whatever, now can she?

 Musicians, of course, are another story, and that is what Geraldine van Heemstra has been doing over the last year at the Menuhin School, observing young musicians, and then transforming what she has seen into artwork in a wide range of media – drypoint, monoprint, pencil, charcoal, oil. I had the chance to do my own bit of observing a week or so back, when two Menuhin students between them produced a dazzling rendition of one of Bach’s Violin Sonatas at the A&D Gallery in Chiltern Street, where Geraldine’s work was on show. As I listened, my eye wandering from artwork to violinist, from violinist to artwork, I found myself seeing the movement of the performer’s bowing arm somehow conjured up with just a few swift strokes of a pencil, the raptness of the player’s concentration reflected by an inexplicable depth in what was on canvas, well beyond what might be expected from such a judiciously controlled use of the contents of the palette. I listened and observed; observed and listened.

Come to think of it, maybe an artist can, after all, capture music on canvas, or paper, or whatever…. She can.

Julian Johnston, London 7 July 2016