TV REVIEW : An Intimate Visit With the Menuhins

Trust the title: “Menuhin: A Family Portrait” is just that. Airing tonight on KCET Channel 28 at 10 (KPBS Channel 15 at 9), the Tony Palmer biography explores the family life of violinist Yehudi Menuhin in leisurely and astonishingly intimate detail.

The fact that Menuhin, 75, is one of the legends of 20th-Century music is taken for granted. His art, in itself, is treated rather cavalierly. Neither the compositions nor the performers are identified directly in any of the many fascinating clips intercut with interview segments.

His collaborations with Stephane Grappelli and Ravi Shankar, for example, are noted only in such clips, which quickly become submerged in voice-overs. His relationships with composers such as Elgar, Enescu and Bartok emerge simply as biographical anecdotes, and you must watch carefully for any indication of his wide-ranging humanitarian activities.

Family members are identified on-screen, though not always accurately--Hephzibah Menuhin is labeled his “elder sister,” when she was four years younger. That she and her younger sister, Yaltah, had distinguished pianist careers of their own is not even mentioned.

It is, however, the long, quietly bitter reflections of Yaltah--Hephzibah died in 1981--that provide the dark side of this biography.

Yaltah emphasizes the rootless and largely loveless nature of the siblings’ childhood. Her calm plaints are then echoed in sad irony by her brothers’ own children, and they cast a shadow over Menuhin’s surprisingly anti-climactic meeting with his iron-willed mother late in the show.

The sunny side of Menuhin’s life appears readily in the portions with his second wife, Diana. She provides a blithe, affectionate counterpoise to Sir Yehudi’s dreamy smile and vague ruminations, playing to the camera with brisk, possessive charm.

“A Family Portrait” does locate psychological reasons for the technical decline in Menuhin’s performance quality in the shock of his divorce and then his encounter with victims of the Holocaust when he and Benjamin Britten played a recital at Belsen immediately after the war. The reality of the decline is documented with candid clips of a flagging performance.

In other cases of the mature Menuhin’s playing--as opposed to his conducting--the sight and sound of the clips is suspiciously unsynchronized. The excerpts range from a silent news reel feature on the child prodigy to current efforts, but the music is always background to the man.