Cardus’s review the following Monday was headlined ‘New Star in the West’. It was the kind of encomium that explodes once in an epoch and is quoted in anthologies ever after. Cardus, who had spent a long day pining for the dotted intricacy of a musical score while the cricket score advanced at a dour thirty runs an hour, was clearly bowled over by Dovidl. He extolled the artist’s liquid tone, dashing runs, languid stance and gaunt good looks –a combination, if I may mix a metaphorical cocktail, between the wounded Adonis and the young Donald Bradman on his first Ashes tour. Add to these, the eyes of Franz Mesmer and the expressiveness of Laurence Olivier in one of his classical roles – dry, yet infinitely wise – and what we saw and heard in the unadorned Bach recitation was the birth of a comet: the most fully finished young artist I have ever seen astride an English stage, or any other for that matter. My only worry is whether our tiny galaxy is great enough to accommodate his dawning glory.

That morning, the phones went off like fire bells. Journalists clamoured for interviews, orchestras for dates. Mortimer Simmonds refused them all with even affability. ‘The boy’s not quite ready,’ he maintained, his gentle demurral serving only – as intended – to redouble the demand. The cauldron was starting to simmer.

In January 1951, as the government announced the full plans for its Festival of Britain, a three-page story appeared in The Bridge, organ of the violin trade. Titled ‘Rapoport – Heir Apparent?’, the report introduced a ‘Polish-born prodigy who will make his London début on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, a milestone in any young man’s life’. It noted that ‘some have likened the liquescent amber of his tone to the radiance that was Fritz Kreisler’s . . .’ (and you can guess who planted that comparison in the anonymous writer’s mind).

Kreisler’s recent retirement at the age of seventy-four, after fracturing his skull in a road accident [the article continued], has left lovers of the violin without an outlet for their ardour. The incomparable Jascha Heifetz excites admiration and wonderment without engaging our affection. The fastidious Yehudi Menuhin is revered at a sterile distance. The gleaming gifts of Nathan Milstein, Mischa Elman, and others of the Russo-American diaspora have been severely rationed since the war. Miss Ida Haendel, marvellous as she is, is but a slip of a girl.

‘What we long for,’ one hears lamented in the lobby of the Wigmore Hall, ‘is another Kreisler, an artist who can warm the cockles of your heart and give a cheeky wink while playing with effortless individuality. They don’t breed ’em like that any more, do they?’