Professor Yfrah Neaman

Violin virtuoso and teacher

Yfrah Neaman, violinist: born Sidon, Lebanon 13 February 1923; Professor of Violin and head of the Strings Department, Guildhall School of Music and Drama 1962-78, head of the Department of Advanced Solo Studies 1974-2003, Professor Emeritus 1998; OBE 1983; married 1963 Dr Gillian Shaw (one son, one daughter); died London 4 January 2003.

"You can't have your career made for you," Yfrah Neaman once said. "But it can help if someone opens the door." As a violinist who had come up the hard way, and who had spent his whole life opening doors for young hopefuls in the poorest parts of the earth, he knew whereof he spoke.

Born the son of a biblical scholar in Sidon in 1923, he was initially more interested in football than in the violin he was given at six. Fired, however, by Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz when they came to perform in Tel Aviv, he blossomed as a musician and was sent to study at the Paris Conservatoire, where he graduated with the top prize at 14.

The outbreak of the Second World War marooned him and his mother in a fishing port near Biarritz, where he was studying with Jacques Thibaud, and their escape to London – following the Nazi occupation of France – was straight out of the movies. Told by the British consul to keep his eye on a particular bookshop window, Neaman ran up from the beach one day to find a cryptic notice: "Embarkation starts at midnight". Darkness and drizzle; a tense crowd of Jewish refugees and wounded soldiers on the quay; a communal pile of belongings; the last Allied ship waiting to take them to safety.

Neaman had already studied in London with the Hungarian maestro Carl Flesch, the first maestro to "codify" the art of violin-playing. Now he was taken on – gratis, since he was penniless – by Flesch's pupil Max Rostal, who was at that point the starriest fiddler in London. But the perversely anti-Semitic Whitehall official responsible for refugees insisted that Neaman work in a factory making goggles for pilots, even though he had already joined Cema (the Council for Education in Music and the Arts – Britain's first ever voluntary scheme to send musicians to cheer up workers and patients in hospitals). He was one of the musicians who regularly played in Myra Hess's lunchtime National Gallery concerts during the Blitz.

One Sunday morning in 1944 his phone rang. Rostal had broken a wrist: could Neaman stand in with the London Symphony Orchestra that afternoon? By chance the critic James Agate was present, and praised his performance at ecstatic length. Whitehall kept him banged up in his factory until the end of the war, but he had got his break. He soon made his mark as a new-music virtuoso, premiering works by Copland, Bernstein, Lutyens, Ferguson and others. As befitted his artistic lineage, his tone was sweet and pure, and his playing had immaculately elegant expressiveness: his European virtuosity was powered by the same indomitable spirit as that which had lifted the great Jewish violinists out of Odessa at the start of the 20th century.

By the mid-Fifties, Neaman was a sought-after international star, not as famous as his friend Yehudi Menuhin, but definitely in the same league. But gradually he realised that what he most wanted was to pass on what he had learnt from his three great teachers. Flesch had been the first to show systematically how any given sound could be produced. "Even today," said Neaman in the Eighties, "there are people who find that idea unpalatable, who prefer to believe in a direct line from God to the player, untrammelled by calculation." But to watch Neaman himself teach – inculcating that calculation – was to realise that the line from God was still part of the equation. Like Flesch, whose classes were open to anyone who wanted to come in and listen, Neaman developed his own graceful variant on the Socratic master-class, with his students giving real performances on which outsiders were welcome to eavesdrop.

For 44 years these took place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where Neaman headed several instrumental departments. He also taught at home, in an exquisite music room – redolent of pre-war Paris – which was dominated by the Steinway his friend Myra Hess had bequeathed to him. Fellow residents in his street got accustomed to two regular sights each morning: Yfrah running to and from the paper shop full-pelt (he was still athletic in his mid-seventies), and a steady stream of young violinists going in and out of his house.

Many of these were from the Far East. Neaman forged close links with the leading string teachers of Japan, Korea, and China, staying in touch with colleagues in Beijing and Shanghai throughout their sufferings at the hands of the Red Guards, and giving what help he could to both teachers and taught. For the latter he was the best kind of godfather, spotting talented players, giving local concerts with them, and finding ways of funding their tuition in Britain, often through the Myra Hess Trust which he chaired.

"The Jewish Mama has been transformed into the Far Eastern Mama," he once observed. "When I teach in Korea, the mother comes along with cassette, notebook, and pen, and she in effect directs the show." But there was a significant difference in emphasis. "A typical Far Eastern parent will say to me afterwards: 'Thank you so much for giving skill to my child.' Not great artistry, not understanding of music – skill."

That was the lacuna he himself set out to fill: his success can be measured by the number of top violinists all over the world who learned their art with him, and who acknowledge that debt with gratitude. Politely scathing about spiky hair and wet T-shirts, he demanded perfection, but never at the expense of feeling; he inspired in his students an intense loyalty and affection, responses which were always apparent at the Hengrave Hall International Violin Summer School, which he set up and ran in Suffolk for 25 years.

Awards, medals, and honorary professorships took him constantly round the world – his 1983 appointment as OBE was never upgraded into a knighthood, as it long ago should have been – but the work which most preoccupied him, as time went on, was running competitions. He was artistic director of the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition, and of the London International String Quartet Competition, which he founded jointly with Yehudi Menuhin in 1980; he served on the juries of numerous other international competitions.

His quartet contest remains a model of how such things should be run. There's an audience prize, and a requirement that each group perform a newly composed work for which they have a mere day to prepare. "What we want to see is whether they are a cohesive ensemble, whether they can speak to each other intuitively," Neaman explained. And he and Menuhin chose well: their first winners were the then unknown Takacs Quartet; in successive years they singled out the Endellion, Hagen and Ysaye quartets, all of whom are now up in lights.

Yfrah Neaman's last years were marked by terrible sadness, as his GP wife Gill Neaman fell victim to Alzheimer's disease. He bore this with patience and stoicism, as he did the cancer which eventually killed him. It was entirely typical that, when desperately ill and in considerable pain, he should eagerly agree to help set up a new competition for young players in far-flung places. And that, on the day he was finally taken into a hospice, he should give two lessons, deploying to the last his unique blend of cheerfulness and old-world charm.

Michael Church

I first met Yfrah Neaman in the mid-Seventies when I was researching for a book on great violinists, writes Margaret Campbell. He proved to be a mine of information. We kept in touch and much later when I started writing obituaries for The Independent I could rely on him for a quote. He seemed to know everybody in the profession and could always provide an apt comment or anecdote.

Although he started playing the violin at the age of six, he felt that his early teachers were not very helpful. He told me that, when he began playing Mozart concertos at the age of 10, he was told, "Play gracefully and imagine frilly cuffs." Even then, he knew this advice was useless. He won the Premier Prix at the Conservatoire and studied with Jacques Thibaud, but still felt there was something missing. Then at 14 he was taken on by Carl Flesch, one of the greatest teachers of the 20th century, and everything changed. He told me that it was as if a curtain had been torn away. He explained:

I believe that a musical work is brought to life by taking the text, absorbing it, then giving it back through your own sensibility and understanding. Flesch did not put it into these words, but that is what he meant.

Yfrah went on to become a very accomplished soloist with impeccable technique and an innate musicality. He also produced a beautiful mellow tone on his "Golden Age" Stradivarius violin made in 1724.

He could easily have continued his solo career, but having found his real vocation he devoted himself to teaching. However, he maintained that it would have been difficult to guide his students towards performance if he had not had the experience himself.