By Bob Aldrich
The Los Gatos home of Marusha Menuhin was the setting Jan. 7 for a celebration of her 100th birthday. Some 60 guests, including her son, world-renowned violinist and conductor Lord Yehudi Menuhin, his wife, Lady Diane Menuhin, and their son, Gerard Menuhin, were on hand for the festivities.
Lifelong friends from Yehudi Menuhin's earliest childhood years in San Francisco and Los Gatos, Mrs. Louis Sloss, 96, and Mrs. Agnes Albert, 94, were present, as was Mary Tobin, who at the age of 5 was Yehudi Menuhin's girlfriend.
Also attending the party for the wife of the late Moshe Menuhin were some third- and fourth-generation members of the Ehrman family. It was Sidney Ehrman who, in 1927, enabled the Menuhins to settle in Paris, where the then-11-year-old Yehudi studied with legendary violinist-composer Georges Enesco, according to an associate of Lord Menuhin.
Seven of Marusha Menuhin's great-grandchildren could not attend. The younger three generations met on New Year's Eve at the home of Zamira Benthall, Yehudi Menuhin's first-born child.
Lord Menuhin's 80th birthday on April 22 will be marked by a dinner for more than 300 at Buckingham Palace and a concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, where Lord Menuhin will conduct his orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, with other musical celebrities; the concert will benefit the Yehudi Menuhin School and Live Music Now, an international organization to bring live music to the poor and confined.
Recordings of the nine symphonies of Beethoven made live with the Symphonia Varsavia under Menuhin's direction at the Strasbourg Festival, are to be released later this year.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, January 17, 1996.
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