During the 1950s and 60s, my father lived just two streets away from Alfredo Campoli, and since he played in the LSO for almost all of that period, he came across Alfredo frequently. He never had a good word to say for the violinist. Partly because of Campoli's background (a café violinist who announced he was turning “classical” after 1945 when café orchestras went out of fashion in England) and partly because of what he once termed to me “his pretentiousness”.

Being the son of my father, I imbibed this prejudice. And listening again this evening to Fat Alfredo playing the Elgar violin concerto, I concede that my father was right. Alfredo was not a violinist of stature. The Elgar violin concerto (1954, with Adrian Boult) features ever-so-sweet violin playing, a bit like eating a meal of sweet courses where even the ham is braised in honey, the whole accompanied by a sweet white wine. When the music is sentimental, Alfredo wows it like a cheap Italian tenor from a minor Italian opera house. The 1954 recording is one of those mono recordings where the orchestra has three microphones (or whatever) and the soloist a microphone all to himself; the effect is almost as if Alfredo had been dubbed on afterwards. We have here an Anglo-Italian version of the Israeli Itzhak Perlman and I don't like it, just as I don't care for Perlman. Bring on the unlikely duo of Albert Sammons and Thomas Zehetmair (for the Elgar violin concerto).