Ida Haendel, 95, violinist who played at the Proms before the Second World War

[Michael Rhodes]

_. Ida Haendel, the violinist, who has died aged probably 95, was a child prodigy who played with Sir Henry Wood at the Proms before the Second World War; she went on to build a career of some distinction yet, despite her undoubted abilities, she never quite achieved the public recognition enjoyed by contemporaries such as Yehudi Menhuin and Isaac Stern....

She performed in Myra Hess's wartime concerts at the National Gallery and was an almost annual fixture at the Proms for half a century




Telegraph grab

[Michael Rhodes]

-. The Polish-born violinist Ida Haendel, who has died aged 96, enthralled audiences around the world with a combination of classical rigour and romantic warmth – the mix of “ice and fire … simply mind-blowing” that one reviewer found in a recording of the Sibelius concerto. It was taken from her penultimate Promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in 1993; the last of her 68 Proms came the following year, with the concerto by Britten.

When Haendel started at the Proms, with the Beethoven concerto (1937) and the Brahms (1938), the concerts were still held at the Queen’s Hall, off Regent Street, and their conductor, Henry Wood, was one of her early champions. She went on to give Proms performances of works from Mozart to Stravinsky, with televised accounts of Shostakovich’s First Concerto (1976) and, in the season’s last night, Saint-Saëns’s Third (1989).

Guardian