Our next great visitor, the incomparable Jascha Heifetz, was in a different category, and certainly Beecham's response was varied in his case; for the first concert all was light and smiles. For the recording which followed Beecham seemed to wear ear-plugs most of the time. For the final concert, Sir Thomas reserved some of his most telling audience-distract technique for the brilliant cadenza in the Brahms Concert, coughing, borrowing boiled sweets from the leader of the second fiddles, unwrapping these with noisy gusto in the quiet bits, and sucking them with obvious delight as the sweating soloist wondered if Beecham would be in time to catch him on the final trill. I never really knew what went wrong between Beecham and Heifetz. Whatever it was was a pity, because it must have robbed the world of the finest possible performances of several masterpieces. Certainly that first concert, with concertos by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, showed exactly what those possibilities were. It was the first time Heifetz had appeared in London since before the war; he was, I am sure, aware that he was regarded as the greatest violinist in the world by most of those at the Albert Hall - including the members of the RPO. All he has to do now was to prove it. The send-off he got from the introduction of the Beethoven was clearly in this very mould. Incredibly, I could see as he stood there that he was shivering with nerves, pale and ghostly as he waited for those difficult rising octaves which show us the mettle of any player. You could see the grip this magnificent artist took upon his technique at that moment. Suddenly, in his anger, there came to him the knowledge that he was, in fact, still the greatest of them all. Every remaining note in both concertos he proceeded to use to the full to make this clear to us all; and in it he was helped, almost joyfully, by Sir Thomas. A thousand pities that, somehow, things later went wrong, before the recording sessions; for this concert must have been among the finest musical achievements of both these great musicians, and would have been priceless if committed to wax. << less