"He brought music to life in the most wonderful way. He looked inside the music. He really brought out the inner shape of the music — that was his great talent. Every note was alive and had its place, without foisting anything on it. He was not the easiest or kindest of men, but he was a great musician and you can hear it, especially in recordings of his conducting in the last years of his life."

Today no professor would dream of throwing a glass of beer over a student's head (at least, I hope they wouldn't). But otherwise, Isserlis feels, the IMS's special quality is that it preserves the essence of a golden age of musicianship. "It's more a matter of ideals than a specific tradition," he adds. "We can go there and look deeply into the music, and not worry about career or projection, these horrible words which I hate. Of course, people come down there who are ambitious and do worry about those things. But they're usually the ones who don't like it and go away again."

András Schiff visited the IMS for the first time when he was invited by Végh himself (under whose baton he later recorded a series of CDs of the Mozart piano concertos). "Végh was a very great artist, a great musician, an enormous influence," he says. "He's no longer there, but his spirit is. The attitude is the same."

The sterling quality of the IMS remains inextricably interwoven with its home base. Végh first saw the place when Behrens, who was studying the violin with him at the time, invited him to Cornwall to perform the Beethoven Violin Concerto in a local music festival with which he was involved. "He was thrilled with the county," says Behrens. "He had a little time to go to Tintagel and look around. Afterwards, he turned round and said, ‘Look, I'll set up a masterclass course here if you'll organise it'." Behrens has done so ever since.