In his interesting book Fiddling with Life, the Canadian violinist Steven Staryk expounds on the importance for teachers of communicating the concept of different styles of performance to their pupils. Staryk's words came back to me listening to Ivan Zenaty and Antonin Kubalek playing Dvorak's music for violin and piano (a Dorian recording from 1992). Leaving aside Zenaty's violin playing, Kubalek's piano playing and Dvorak's music, one is very conscious of how, stylistically, everything sounds right. Actually the playing, and much of the music, are also right.

Nationalism in musical performance is a dangerous area. Once one admits that the Russians are a bit special in Russian (and Slavonic) music, the French and Belgians in French music, and the Central European school of Czechs, Hungarians, Austrians and Germans in the music of Central Europe: what about all those superb instrumentalists in Israel, North America, Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, etc? What are they supposed to specialise in? (The Americans only have the Barber concerto, for Heaven's sake).

And there are well-known examples of chameleons who cross the boundaries. Heifetz's sophisticated and subtle playing is well suited to the French repertoire, and his playing of César Franck, Lalo, Vieuxtemps and Saint-Saëns easily rivals the performances of the Gallic Artur Grumiaux or Christian Ferras. Gioconda de Vito's Brahms was famous, and the Canadian Leila Josefowicz sounds superbly at home in Shostakovich. However, as a generalisation, the nationalistic bias has some foundation in practice: after 80 years, the English Albert Sammons is still my first choice in the Elgar violin concerto, and the Germans Georg Kulenkampff and Erich Röhn fight it out over the Beethoven violin concerto.

Perhaps the best example of non-style is Yehudi Menuhin who sounds exactly the same in Bach, Bartok, Brahms, Enescu or Lekeu. No chameleon, he.