Menuhin is the world’s toughest violin competition. Why is it packed with Asians, and no Brits?

‘The truth is,’ says Gordon Back, lowering his voice, ‘that if the violin finalists from the BBC Young Musician of the Year were to enter the Menuhin Competition, they wouldn’t make it to the first round.’ Not through the first round, note, but to the first round: they wouldn’t be good enough to compete.

Back is artistic director of the Menuhin, held every two years in a different country. In effect, it’s a search for the next Yehudi Menuhin, who recorded the Elgar concerto with the composer at the age of 15.

Some critics think Menuhin never quite fulfilled that astonishing early promise — but I wouldn’t dare suggest that to Gordon Back. He’s a legendary piano accompanist, having partnered not just his friend Yehudi but also Nathan Milstein, Itzhak Perlman, Maxim Vengerov and Yo-Yo Ma. We have lunch in a hotel in Austin, Texas, where the 2014 competition was held last month. Back is a genial, hyperactive Welshman with a combative streak. He beams when we discover we share a dislike of someone. ‘If I can speak candidly…’ I say. ‘Oh, please do.’

This is the day of the under-16 junior semi-finals. ‘You won’t believe your ears,’ says Back. ‘Some little kid who’s never been outside Taiwan starts playing Kreisler with an authentic Viennese tone and you see tears on the faces of hardened judges.’

Sure enough, Alex Zhou walks on to the stage of the Bates Recital Hall and out pours a gloriously refined performance of Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata. As fragments of melody bounce between violin and piano, I think: this would earn fierce applause at the Wigmore Hall even if Alex were 24 instead of 12. Surely he’s going to win. But he doesn’t, because this is the standard of the competition and 14-year-old Rennosuke Fukuda from Japan makes my jaw drop even further.