Recorded in the 1920s. Eileen Beattie, piano

Found at The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) was established on 1 April 2004, supported by a 5-year grant of just under £1m from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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Isolde Marie Menges was an English violinist born on May16. She is known for having a major prize named after her at the Royal College of Music in England. Menges was said to possess a very legato and fine tone and her playing was described as being soulful and exuberant. She began her violin studies with her father. She later studied for three years in Russia (St Petersburg) with Leopold Auer, although she was never known as one of his famous pupils. She also studied with Carl Flesch -- she was not one of his famous pupils either. She began her concertizing career at an early age. For her formal London debut in February of 1913, she played both the Tchaikovsky concerto and the Symphonie Espagnol by Eduard Lalo, something that no concert violinist today would dare do (for a debut.) She was 19 years old. (A few violinists -- Raymond Cohen and Yehudi Menuhin, for instance - have played three concertos in one evening, but not two in a debut performance.) Two weeks later, she played the Beethoven and the Wieniawski concertos at another concert. Soon thereafter, she again played two concertos in a single program - the Brahms and the Glazunov concertos. Her interpretations were highly praised and she was compared to Marie Hall. In 1918, she spent several months teaching in Canada. Menges was entrusted with presenting the English premiere of Ernst Von Dohnanyi's first violin concerto (opus 27 - 1915) in 1923. She also toured the U.S. Three famous conductors with whom she worked early on were Willem Mengelberg, Bruno Walter, and Ernest Bloch. In September 1931, she was appointed violin and chamber music teacher at the Royal College of Music in England. She was 38 years old. Coincidentally, she also founded the Isolde Menges Quartet in that same year. The quartet was somewhat unusual for the time in that it brought together female and male players -- Isolde Menges, Beatrice Carelle, John Dyer (viola), and Ivor James (cello.) Menges also played and gave many concerts with a Quintet. In 1938, her Quartet was one of the first to present the entire cycle of Beethoven Quartets in London. Menges retired from the Royal College of Music in 1971. She was 78 years old. Her pupils include Leonard Salzedo, Norma Varga, Isobel Murray, and Malinee Peris. Interestingly, her brother, (conductor-composer) Herbert Menges, conducted the recordings by Joseph Szigeti, of the Brahms and the first violin concerto of Prokofiev. Isolde Menges died on January 13, 1976, at age 83.

Reviews

February 1913: Queen's Hall, Tchaikovsky V concerto: "...remarkable command of the bow and ... almost childish delight in displaying her mastery. Sometimes the conductor had to restrain her when she was on the point of making off with a passage at breakneck speed, and her phrasing was of the impulse kind which makes such frankly bravura music as this entertaining... [H]er tone was extraordinarily pure and her style clean and crisp... [In a Chopin nocturne] great beauty of cantabile quality, but she missed some of the daintiness of Kreisler's "Schoen Rosmarin" by taking it too fast" And in this piece in April 1913: "... clean double-stopping, and ... brilliant manipulation of exacting passages... She.. succeeded in making the listener take a good deal of interest in it"

May 24, 1913: Queen's Hall, Brahms V concerto: "[Although in the Tchaikovsky in February she showed] impulsiveness which bordered upon rashness... [now in the Brahms] her playing... was exceedingly careful of detail, and there was a very great beauty in her whole performance. She had evidently studied the work musically as well as technically, as the distinction of her phrasing showed... [but] she did not quite succeed in making clear.. the intricate development of the slow movement"

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