Violins and Violas

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    How a Violin Maker’s Dreams Came True in Cremona, Italy

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    Art of Craft is a series about craftspeople whose work rises to the level of art.When Ayoung An was 8, her parents bought her a violin. She slept with the instrument on the pillow next to her every night.Two years later, a shop selling musical instruments opened in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, her hometown, and An became a fixture there, pelting the owner with questions. “I think I bothered him a lot,” An, now 32, said.As a teenager, she decided she would become a violin maker. Eventually, a journey with twists and turns took her to Cremona in northern Italy — a famed hub for violin makers, including masters like Antonio Stradivari, since the 16th century. There, An, a rising star in the violin-making world with international awards under her belt, runs her own workshop.Ayoung An, a rising star in the violin-making world, at her studio in Cremona, Italy, home to famed masters like Antonio Stradivari. Set on a quiet cobblestone street, An’s studio is bathed in natural light and filled with books and piles of wood chunks that must air dry for five to 10 years before becoming instruments or risk warping. She shares the two-room studio with her husband, Wangsoo Han, who’s also a violin maker.On a recent Monday, An was hunched over a thick 20-inch piece of wood held in place by two metal clamps. Pressing her body down for leverage, she scraped the wood with a gouge, removing layers, her hands steady and firm. She was forming a curving neck called a “scroll,” one of the later steps of making a violin or cello. On this day, the violin maker was immersed on a commission for a cello, which shares a similar crafting process.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amnon Weinstein, Who Restored Violins From the Holocaust, Dies at 84

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      Many had been left behind by victims of the gas chambers. He let the instruments be heard again in melodic tributes through his organization, Violins of Hope.Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so that musicians around the world could play them in hopeful, melodic tributes to those silenced in Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Avshalom Weinstein.Mr. Weinstein was the founder of Violins of Hope, an organization that provides the violins he restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments have been played in dozens of cities worldwide, including Berlin, at an event marking the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in a 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound is standing for a boy, a girl and men and women that will never talk again. But the violins, when they are played on, will speak for them.”There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps, and who were then forced to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was tossed from a train to a railway worker by a man who knew his fate.“In the place where I now go, I don’t need a violin,” the man told the worker, in Mr. Weinstein’s telling. “Here, take my violin so it may live.”Mr. Weinstein in his Tel Aviv workshop. He himself was the son of a violin repairman.Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Miriam Solovieff, Lauded Violinist Who Suffered Tragedy

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      She led a successful career despite coping with a horrific event that she witnessed at 18: the killing of her mother and sister at the hands of her father.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.On Feb. 23, 1940, Miriam Solovieff gave a recital at Town Hall in Manhattan. She was 18 and widely known as a violin prodigy, having toured much of the United States, Canada and Europe. It was no surprise, then, that the recital, presenting work by Mozart, Vivaldi and Alexander Glazunov, would receive positive reviews.What was surprising was the concert’s timing. Just six weeks earlier, Solovieff’s mother and younger sister — her entire family — were murdered by their estranged father.Solovieff had kept vigil by her mother as she lay dying from gunshot wounds in a hospital bed. And she ultimately heeded her mother’s urging that she not cancel the recital (it would be postponed a mere two weeks).The shootings became a tragedy so unspeakable that after the initial news reports, it was discussed only in hushed circles. For Solovieff, it opened a chasm between childhood promise, spent in the company of her cherished mother and sister, and an extraordinary adulthood, albeit one that bore tremendous emotional repercussions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Unlikely Fiddler’s Dream

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      Michael Cleveland was born blind and mostly deaf. That was only the beginning of his journey to become one of modern bluegrass’s most compelling musicians.Michael Cleveland had been 13 for five days the first time he picked with the bluegrass demigod Doc Watson — in a backstage bathroom, no less, at an awards show in Kentucky.It was September 1993. Peter Wernick, the first president of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), had assembled a band of young hotshots to provide a pointed rebuttal to a Washington Post feature that argued kids didn’t care about antiquated mountain music. The teenage quintet electrified its audience, sprinting through a Bill Monroe standard with verve that suggested these sounds were vital to fresh generations.After the triumphant ceremony, John Cleveland ushered his son — born blind, with one eye; almost deaf in his left ear and partly deaf in his right — to the bathroom. They found Watson, Wernick and a cadre of other genre giants laughing and jamming there, as though the lavatory were a back porch, and the teenage Michael joined for an hour.“I had no shame, no fear, nothing,” Cleveland, 42, remembered with a hoot by phone from the Indiana home he shares with his father. “I thought, ‘This may be the only opportunity I ever have to hear this person play, to be near them.’ That was pretty much all I wanted to do — raw, high-energy bluegrass.”The nascent teenager didn’t consider how Watson, who had lost his eyesight seven decades earlier at the age of 1, was the counterargument he needed: Teachers had warned Cleveland for years that career prospects for a blind bluegrass fiddler were grim, but he played on.In the three decades since, Cleveland has become a bluegrass star himself, winning 29 IBMA awards and becoming the organization’s most decorated fiddler. He is one of the world’s most in-demand and distinctive players, with collaborators that include Béla Fleck, Billy Strings and Vince Gill. “He plays with such ferocity,” Gill said by phone. “But the amount of emotion he pulls out of that instrument is way more appealing than the amount of notes.”Cleveland has only just begun to funnel his full story into records, documenting the hardships and joys of a difficult life devoted to bluegrass. Alternately woebegone and hopeful, his star-studded “Lovin’ of the Game,” out Friday, is an ecstatic document of what the fiddle has meant to his story — and what he hopes to mean to its history.“For a long time, Michael didn’t want to talk about being blind. He never wanted to be the little blind boy that played fiddle, for people to like his music because he was handicapped,” his father said. “He’s past that, and I’m glad — he might open up this music for somebody, to inspire them.”Cleveland was a boyhood bluegrass zealot, not a prodigy. When he was six weeks old, his parents began toting him to bimonthly Saturday concerts his grandparents hosted at an American Legion in Henryville, Ind. In his stroller, friends remembered, he would bounce to the music in perfect time. As a toddler, he became so obsessed with the staple “Rocky Top” that his parents drove him to Tennessee to meet the couple who had written it; even now, he keeps the cassette they gave him, an hourlong compendium of assorted versions.Still, Cleveland couldn’t play. A nearby fiddler struggled to show his first blind student how to hold the bow or the instrument. Teachers at the Kentucky School for the Blind fared better with a contraption that kept the bow at the proper position, but they were more interested in the Suzuki method and classical music than Flatt & Scruggs. “On the first day, they asked me what I knew about violin,” Cleveland said, catching his breath from laughter before offering his reply. “‘Well, I don’t know much about the violin,’ I said, ‘but I know a lot about the fiddle.’”Those first few years remained a struggle. One night, though, Cleveland dreamed about playing “Soldier’s Joy,” a mirthful fiddle number about payday he’d heard countless times. When he reached for his instrument the next morning, the tune was there.Though he balked his first fiddle contest, he kept trying, even joining Monroe, the bluegrass fountainhead, onstage at age 9. Soon after he delighted that awards-show crowd in Kentucky, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut with Alison Krauss. But it wasn’t Cleveland’s back story that people found compelling, like some cloying “American Idol” package.“You can feel his timing and pulse so well, like the drive of a banjo player,” the multi-instrumentalist Sam Bush said in an interview, listing Cleveland as one of perhaps three bluegrass fiddlers ever to have that quality. (The others? Benny Martin and Paul Warren.) “Then he adds finesse, and he will surprise you.”As a child, Cleveland was obsessed with fiddle music.Andrew Cenci for The New York TimesAs Cleveland’s fiddle prowess ballooned, the rest of his life deflated. Though the young musician felt welcome and encouraged in bluegrass, he understood he was different. By 12, he’d endured 30 separate surgeries to correct a cleft palate and lip, to insert a prosthetic eye and to reroute a blood vessel in his brain. He suffered serial bouts of spinal meningitis, and his eardrums were permanently perforated. His parents were then in the middle of an acrimonious divorce that would alienate him from his mother for decades.“Bill Monroe lost his mother at 10, his father at 16. There are similarities there with Michael you can feel,” said Ronnie McCoury, who began playing with his own father, the bluegrass pizazz magnate Del, at 14. “Michael’s life has been hard. Those feelings come out on his fiddle.”Cleveland forwent college, hitting the road soon after his high school graduation in 1999, and emerged as an exciting sideman, passionate about bluegrass’s history and quick-witted, too — “a good hang,” as Gill put it. He made several solo records and assembled a band, Flamekeeper. The group kindled unapologetic traditionalism, its intensity making it a fast favorite within staunch bluegrass circles.But six years ago, while enjoying one of Sam Bush’s freewheeling shows, Cleveland considered how bluegrass crowds were aging and shrinking, and how he might do well to adapt, like Bush or Fleck. His subsequent album, “Tall Fiddler” from 2019, flirted with spirited jazz and hardscrabble balladry. With Bush singing about running from the law, he even dipped into rockabilly.“Lovin’ of the Game” reinforces that openness. There’s a playful romp about high-stakes love alongside Billy Strings, and a country lamentation for small-town settling with Charlie Starr, of the Southern rock band Blackberry Smoke. The most vulnerable moment in Cleveland’s catalog comes with “Temperance Reel,” a centuries-old tune updated with lyrics about a musician struggling with alcoholism, as Cleveland did for many years. His strings sing with unbridled joy, as if animated by possibility.“There’s no mistaking I’m a bluegrass player. That’s the biggest part of what I do,” Cleveland said. “But these are ways to push the envelope that, 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been into.”After 40 years of bluegrass fixation, Cleveland has become a de facto archivist. Not long before his parents split, an area aficionado handed him a box of 20 mixtapes of great fiddle performances — each dutifully labeled in Braille, with introductory listening instructions. They form the core of his vast basement tape trove. Cleveland has a recording of that bathroom jam with Watson, too, though he will never listen. He was, as he likes to say, “wearing it out,” playing every lick he knew as hard as he could to prove his worth. The youngest inductee into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame, he’s done that.He’s now focused on what’s next. He tracks fiddle parts for most anyone who asks through the online service AirGigs; John will often hear him alone in the basement, playing through dinner for 10 hours at a time, dabbling in pop and jazz. And, at Fleck’s request, he’s even learning some Bach for their first duo record.“Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C major,” he sighed, chuckling at the irony of how being the best bluegrass fiddler brought him back to the classical violin he’d quit. “I know just enough to be dangerous. But yeah, I thought, I can do that.” More

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      Joshua Bell’s London

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      “The first time I came to London, I was 17,” the violinist Joshua Bell, now 54, told me. We were at dinner together following a recent performance of his at Wigmore Hall, a small but renowned concert hall. “I came with my parents to make my first album,” he continued. “This was in the ’80s, and I remember thinking there wasn’t a lot of variety in food. Now, of course, it’s great.”Mr. Bell estimates he’s been to London around 70 times since then.“One of the problems with classical music is that it’s developed a reputation of formality,” Mr. Bell said. “In fact, classical music can be the most exciting thing to watch.”So no, the virtuoso and onetime child prodigy doesn’t live in London. But you could say he’s a professional visitor. His London is one of exquisite taste, uncommonly good food and a handful of tiny places you’d breeze right by if you didn’t know they were there — with, of course, a measure of music.Mr. Bell tends to favor lesser-known places, with one very notable exception: the Royal Albert Hall. “The Royal Albert Hall has this thing called the Proms. They take out the seats on the lower level, and people line up down the street to get in,” he said. “All these people are standing up like it’s a rock concert, and it’s Beethoven symphonies. It’s incredible.”Here are five of his favorite places to visit in London.1. J.&A. BeareA technician works on a violin at J.&A. Beare in central London. The shop has a collection of precious violins that can be viewed. “In August 2001, I walked into Charles Beare’s shop to pick up a set of strings, and Charles Beare said to me, ‘You have to take a look at the Huberman violin, it’s on its way to Germany.’” The instrument, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713 and known as the Gibson ex Huberman, was legendary. “I knew the famous story of the violin,” Mr. Bell said, recounting its theft from a dressing room at Carnegie Hall in 1936.J.&A. Beare sells more modest violins as well as world-class ones like the one Mr. Bell uses.At the shop in 2001, Mr. Bell fell in love with a violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713.“Charles Beare put me in a room with the violin and after a few notes, I was shaking with excitement. I was in love with it. I had a concert at the Royal Albert Hall — at the Proms — and used that violin that very night.”Even if you’re not in the market for a multimillion-euro violin, J.&A. Beare is worth a visit. The shop is open to the public — but if you want to see the collection of nearly priceless violins, book ahead.2. TrishnaThe tasting menu at Trishna, in Marylebone, is partly what draws Mr. Bell.“I did an event in New York with Salman Rushdie,” Mr. Bell said. “At one point, we were talking about London and he recommended Trishna. I love Indian food, but Trishna is not your typical Indian restaurant. The problem with Indian food for me is that I want to try a lot of things. I don’t just want to have one lamb curry as my dinner.” Instead, Mr. Bell likes to get the five-course tasting menu — “and a crab dish that’s really great,” he said.Trishna’s cozy interior.The Michelin-starred restaurant, with its private nooks, mirrored walls, delicately gilded surfaces, feels a like special occasion kind of place. It’s also best to come hungry. “I like places where they just get the tasting menu because I eat everything,” says Mr. Bell. “I like the person cooking it to choose what he wants to present.”3. Wigmore HallThe exterior of Wigmore Hall, a 552-seat concert venue in Marylebone.“Wigmore Hall doesn’t have name recognition to the general public,” said Mr. Bell of the 552-seat concert hall in Marylebone. With its small stage and red velvet seating, Wigmore Hall has a hushed, intimate appeal. “One of the problems with classical music is that it’s developed a reputation of formality. I’ve actually seen classical musicians admonish the audience for clapping at the wrong time. In fact, classical music can be the most exciting thing to watch.”With its small stage and red velvet seating, Wigmore Hall has a hushed, intimate appeal.“Having said that, it’s nice that there are places like Wigmore Hall where you know everyone understands. It’s like for an actor to do theater in a place where people really get it. And Wigmore Hall has history for me personally. The first concert there — I think it was 1901 — was played by the teacher of my teacher, Ysaÿe, the greatest violinist at the end of the 19th century in Europe. I feel the history when I walk on the stage.”4. Baglioni HotelThe Baglioni Hotel is a favorite of Bell’s when he’s performing at the Proms, an annual series of classical music concerts.When days are packed with rehearsals and evenings are given to performing, proximity to one’s bed is important — as is a nice hotel around that bed. And so when Mr. Bell plays at the Royal Albert Hall, he always stays at Hotel Baglioni, a stone’s throw away. “It’s an Italian boutique hotel and has a very intimate feel,” he said. “It feels like people know you there, and the rooms have this sort of very sexy vibe — they’re just very boudoir-like and dark. I sleep better in those kinds of rooms.”Its location also means he can “walk to the rehearsals and back — you can also walk right across the street to Hyde Park. It’s my home when I’m at the Proms.”5. Fidelio Cafe“It’s clearly a passion project for the owner,” Mr. Bell said of Fidelio Cafe, “who loves classical music and food and puts them together.” (Mr. Bell is seated at a table on the left.)Gabriel Isserlis“Very few places like this exist — or dare to offer this,” said Mr. Bell of Fidelio Cafe. The “this” in question is the intersection of a sweet little bistro and live, world-class classical music.Imagine a small cafe where the walls are papered in actual sheet music, a grand piano greets you at the front door and the menu — with its home-roasted granola, slow-cooked aubergine and roasted cherry tomato bruschetta — seems crafted from the morning’s farmer’s market.It’s also “about the uniqueness of having a meal in an intimate space while hearing chamber music,” Mr. Bell said. “It’s clearly a passion project for the owner, who loves classical music and food and puts them together.”“One of my dreams is to open a food-slash-music venue,” he added. “When I see places like Fidelio, I love that people are thinking outside the box and celebrating classic music in such an usual way.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist and Pioneering Concertmaster, Dies at 70

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      “Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she once said, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Jorja Fleezanis, a dynamic violinist and dedicated teacher who was one of the first women to serve as concertmaster of a major symphony orchestra in the United States, died on Sept. 9 at her home in Lake Leelanau, Mich. She was 70.The Minnesota Orchestra, in which Ms. Fleezanis played from the first chair for two decades, said the cause was “a cardiovascular event.”The concertmaster holds a key position with an orchestra, with considerable responsibility for defining its sound. Ms. Fleezanis was “a cornerstone player” in the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, its music director from 2003 to 2022, said in a phone interview.“You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as second in command to the conductor,” Ms. Fleezanis explained to The Boston Globe this year. “You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways the conductor can go at that moment, so you’re prepared to make a sharp left, or a gentle left. And you create that unification, that sense of ensemble, almost instantaneously.”Concertmasters often take solo turns, too, playing concertos with their own orchestras. Ms. Fleezanis used those opportunities to advocate for works that audiences were otherwise unlikely to hear from guest violinists — by Benjamin Britten, say, or Roger Sessions — and to promote new scores. She gave the premiere of John Adams’s Violin Concerto, in St. Paul in 1994, collaborating on a pathbreaking piece that won the Grawemeyer Award for composition a year later.For much of the history of the professional orchestra, the post of concertmaster had been reserved for men. Ms. Fleezanis, a “rebel with a violin,” as The Pioneer Press of St. Paul called her, sought to change that from early in her career.“Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she told The Cincinnati Post in 1976, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Ms. Fleezanis at first looked likely to break barriers at the San Francisco Symphony, which she joined as a second violinist in 1980, becoming its associate concertmaster in 1981. Sharing the first stand with Raymond Kobler, she played so “splendidly,” the critic Robert Commanday wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988, that she struck observers “as the stronger of the two, and often the real leader of the section.”In a decision that Mr. Commanday described as “not very defensible,” the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Herbert Blomstedt, stuck with his man, even after it became clear that the cost would be Ms. Fleezanis’s departure. She accepted the overtures of Mr. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Edo de Waart, who was eager to bring her to his new ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra.Hired as acting concertmaster in 1988, she was technically not the first woman to hold the full title of concertmaster at a major orchestra; by the time her position was made permanent early in 1989, Emmanuelle Boisvert had begun work as the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But Ms. Fleezanis was a trailblazer at a time when the gender composition of American orchestras was starting to become more equitable.With her frank personality and her palpable intensity onstage, she was in large part responsible for the resurgence of the Minnesota Orchestra, which came to be widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation early in Mr. Vanska’s tenure, not least for the crisp precision and risk-taking sensibility of its strings. Like its concertmaster, the orchestra performed “with the kind of furious finesse that every composer prays for,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2005.“Early in my career I was told, ‘If you play like that in every concert, you’ll burn out,’ but I knew that wasn’t right,” Ms. Fleezanis said when she left the orchestra to become a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2009. “Playing with full commitment gives back: It revitalizes me.”Ms. Fleezanis during a rehearsal for a weeklong Minnesota Orchestra program in 2006 presenting the work of then-emerging composers. Missy Mazzoli, left, was one of them. Greg Helgeson for The New York TimesJorja Kay Fleezanis was born on March 19, 1952, in Detroit. She was the younger of Parios and Kay Fleezanis’s two children. Her parents, who were Greek immigrants, were not musicians but loved music.She began learning violin at age 8, studying in Detroit with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff, the former concertmaster of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. She later attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she played for the young James Levine in his University Circle Orchestra, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.It was still rare for women to be admitted to major orchestras when Ms. Fleezanis finished her studies. The Chicago Symphony’s music director, Georg Solti, required her to win three separate auditions and to play concerts right under his eye before he was willing to hire a “girl,” as he called her, for his second violin section in 1975. Her kinetic style did not match the staid demeanor of her colleagues, though, and she was all but alone among men. She left after a single season.“A solid musician with a big sound and surprising reserves of energy,” as The Cincinnati Enquirer described her in 1976, Ms. Fleezanis returned to Ohio to lead the newly formed Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. There she founded the Trio d’Accordo, a string trio. She later started the FOG Trio with the cellist Michael Grebanier and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson. An inspirational pedagogue, she held posts at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Minnesota and a variety of other institutions. She retired from the Jacobs School in 2020.While at the San Francisco Symphony, Ms. Fleezanis met Michael Steinberg, a former critic for The Boston Globe who was that orchestra’s publications director and artistic adviser. They married in 1983; he died in 2009. She is survived by her brother, Nickolas.In a 2009 conversation with Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist, Ms. Fleezanis said her husband had stoked her interest in unusual and new works. She recorded Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, but she also recorded pieces by Stefan Wolpe and Aaron Jay Kernis. Nicholas Maw wrote a sonata for her, and John Tavener made her the “Divine Eros” in his vast, mystical “Ikon of Eros,” written for the Minnesota Orchestra’s centennial in 2002. After her husband’s death, she started a commissioning fund in their joint names.“There is a huge body of genius out there,” Ms. Fleezanis told Mr. Bergman, reflecting on the repertoire as she found it. “It’s just a question of how limited you want to choose to be.” More

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      Tree Rings Shed Light on a Stradivarius Mystery

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      Analyses of 17th-century stringed instruments suggest that a young Antonio Stradivari might have apprenticed with a particular craftsman.History is revealed in tree rings. They have been used to determine the ages of historical buildings as well as when Vikings first arrived in the Americas. Now, tree rings have shed light on a longstanding mystery in the rarefied world of multimillion-dollar musical instruments.By analyzing the wood of two 17th-century stringed instruments, a team of researchers has uncovered evidence of how Antonio Stradivari might have honed his craft, developing the skills used in the creation of the rare, namesake Stradivarius violins.Mauro Bernabei, a dendrochronologist at the Italian National Research Council in San Michele all’Adige, and his colleagues published their results last month in the journal Dendrochronologia, and their findings are consistent with the young Stradivari apprenticing with Nicola Amati, a master luthier roughly 40 years his senior. Such a link between the two acclaimed craftsmen has long been hypothesized.In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Stradivari created stringed instruments renowned for their craftsmanship and superior sound. “Stradivari is generally regarded as the best violin maker who ever lived,” said Kevin Kelly, a violin maker in Boston who has handled dozens of Stradivarius instruments.Only about 600 of Stradivari’s masterpieces survive today, all prized by collectors and performers alike. A Stradivarius violin currently on the auction block — the first such sale in decades — is predicted to fetch up to $20 million.An 18th-century depiction of Antonio Stradivari, the Italian crafter of instruments.World History Archive/AlamyStradivari likely learned his craft by apprenticing with an older mentor, as was customary at the time. That could have been Amati, who, by the mid-17th century, was well established and also living in Cremona, a city in what is now Italy.“Some people assume that because Stradivari was Cremonese and he was such a great violin maker, he must have apprenticed with Amati,” said Mr. Kelly, who was not involved in the new study.But evidence of a link between Stradivari and Amati has remained stubbornly tenuous: One violin made by Stradivari bears a label reading “Antonius Stradiuarius Cremonensis Alumnus Nicolaij Amati, Faciebat Anno 1666.” That wording implies that Stradivari was a pupil of Amati, said Mr. Kelly, but it was the only label like it that has surfaced.With the goal of shedding on this musical mystery, Dr. Bernabei and his team visited the Museum of the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples and analyzed the wood of a small harp made by Stradivari in 1681. Using a digital camera, the researchers precisely measured the widths of 157 tree rings visible on the instrument’s spruce soundboard.A small harp by Stradivari from 1681.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesThe pattern created by plotting the width of tree rings, one after the other, is like a fingerprint. This is because the amount that a trees grows each year depends on the weather, water conditions and a slew of other factors, Dr. Bernabei said. “Plants record very accurately what happens in their surroundings.”The researchers compared their measurements from the Stradivari harp with other tree ring sequences measured from stringed instruments. Out of more than 600 records, one stood out for being astonishingly similar: a spruce soundboard from a cello made by Nicola Amati in 1679. “All the maximum and minimum values are coincident,” Dr. Bernabei said. “It’s like somebody split a trunk in two different parts.”The same wood was indeed used to make the Stradivari harp and the Amati cello, Dr. Bernabei and his colleagues suggest. This was consistent with the two craftsmen sharing a workshop, with the elder Amati possibly mentoring the younger Stradivari, the team concluded.Perhaps that is true, said Mr. Kelly, but it is not the only possibility. Instead, Mr. Amati and Stradivari might simply have purchased wood from the same person, he said. After all, luthiers in 17th-and 18th-century Cremona belonged to a small community, said Mr. Kelly. “They basically all lived on the same street.” More

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      A Violin From Hollywood’s Golden Age Aims at an Auction Record

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      Played in “The Wizard of Oz” and other classic films, Toscha Seidel’s Stradivarius could sell for almost $20 million.Rare violins once owned by famed virtuosos like Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin have sold privately in recent years for up to $20 million. The instruments they played typically bear their names, like the “Earl of Plymouth” Stradivarius, which to burnish its reputation, mystique and market value is now also referred to as the “ex-Kreisler.”Can Toscha Seidel work the same marketing magic — even though his fame came mostly from Hollywood rather than the concert hall?Musicians and collectors will know soon. After a global tour currently underway, the violin Seidel owned and played, the “da Vinci” Stradivarius from 1714, will be sold by the online auction house Tarisio, from May 18 through June 9. It is the first Stradivarius from the so-called golden age of violin making to be auctioned in decades.Unlike most musical instruments, over time all Stradivarius violins have acquired names, some rather fanciful, like “the Sleeping Beauty.” The famed virtuoso Paganini called his “Il Canone.” The “da Vinci” has no connection to Leonardo. As a marketing tactic, a dealer who sold three Stradivarius violins in the 1920s named them all after famous Renaissance painters: in addition to the “da Vinci,” the “Titian” and the “Michaelangelo.”The violin itself is naturally the most important factor in determining its value, with instruments made by the Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri families of Renaissance Italy commanding the highest prices. Condition is another crucial consideration. But so, too, is the identity of its prior owners — its provenance.Toscha Seidel, right, in 1918.Genthe photograph collection/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs DivisionFew may recognize Seidel’s name today. But he was so successful by the 1920s that he was able to buy the “da Vinci” for $25,000 (over $400,000 today), a sale featured on the front page of The New York Times on April 27, 1924. Seidel said at the time he wouldn’t trade the violin “for a million dollars” and considered it his most treasured possession, adding, “The tone is of outstanding power and beauty.”Seidel was so well known in his heyday that George and Ira Gershwin wrote a comic song about him and three of his Russian Jewish peers: “Mischa, Sasha, Toscha, Jascha.” (“We are four fiddlers three.”) Seidel and Heifetz were both born in Ukraine; both studied in St. Petersburg with the eminent teacher Leopold Auer; and both emigrated to the United States after the upheavals of the Russian Revolution. They made their concert debuts at Carnegie Hall within months of each other, to critical acclaim.Albert Einstein took violin lessons from Seidel, and together they performed Bach’s Double Concerto for a fund-raiser. They sported thick shocks of unruly hair that reinforced the caricature of the long-haired musician, like Liszt.Both Seidel and Heifetz settled in Los Angeles, where the burgeoning movie industry paved the way for Seidel’s success. By the 1930s, he was surrounded there by a crowd of mostly Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany and war-torn Europe. Among them were the composers Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.Seidel played the principal violin part in many of Korngold’s celebrated film scores, which included “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (for which Korngold won an Academy Award) and “Anthony Adverse” (ditto). The two men recorded a violin and piano arrangement of Korngold’s suite for “Much Ado About Nothing,” with the composer at the piano.Music directors and composers sought out Seidel’s warm, rich tone. He was the concertmaster for the Paramount Studio Orchestra and played the violin solos for MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz” and David Selznick’s “Intermezzo,” in which a famed violinist (played by Leslie Howard) falls in love with his accompanist (Ingrid Bergman).“That we largely associate love scenes or depictions of the less fortunate in films — or any scene evoking tears or strong emotions — with the sound of the violin is largely due to Seidel,” Adam Baer, a violinist and journalist, in a 2017 article for The American Scholar. (Baer’s violin teacher studied with Seidel and insisted that his pupils listen to recordings of Seidel performances.)Seidel’s violin playing was sought out for its warm, rich tone.Andrew White for The New York TimesThough best known for his movie work, Seidel also played standard classical repertoire, soloing with orchestras and touring in recital. In the 1930s, he was heard by millions of radio listeners as the musical director and a frequent soloist with CBS’s symphony orchestra. In 1934 he had his own weekly broadcast on the network, “The Toscha Seidel Program.” (Several recordings showcasing his lush sound are on YouTube, including a 1945 recording of Chausson’s “Poème” with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra led by Leopold Stokowski.)“He was a singing violinist, influenced by the cantorial tradition,” Baer said in an interview. “He played with as much depth of tone and emotional intensity as anyone I’ve heard on disk.”But Seidel never achieved Heifetz’s enduring international fame. In Los Angeles, Heifetz often called on Seidel to play with him in string quartets, literally assuming the role of second fiddle.As the golden age of Hollywood faded, the studios abandoned their in-house orchestras, relying instead on freelancers. And as he aged, Seidel developed a neurological condition that gradually diminished his playing. This once-eminent violinist ended up in a pit orchestra in Las Vegas before retiring to an avocado farm in California. He died in 1962, at 62, with his violin by far his most valuable possession.That violin last sold at auction in London in 1974 for 34,000 pounds (over $3 million today). It is currently owned by the Japanese restaurant chain magnate Tokuji Munetsugu, who has amassed a collection of rare string instruments and sponsors an international violin competition in Japan. (Munetsugu, 73, has not said why he is selling it.)Film music has been making its way into concert halls, and the “Star Wars” and “Jaws” composer John Williams is arguably the most popular living American composer. But movie scores and their mostly anonymous players have long been largely shunned by the classical music elite.Could the “da Vinci” sale nevertheless set a record?The “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius, once owned by the granddaughter of Lord Byron, holds the current record for a violin sold at auction. (Its 2011 sale, for $15.9 million, was also handled by Tarisio.) Like the “Messiah” Stradivarius now owned by the British Museum, the “Lady Blunt” was hardly ever played, and remains in pristine condition.Carlos Tome, a violinist and a co-owner of Tarisio, said the auction house has not published an estimate for the “da Vinci.” Citing its rarity — a Stradivarius from the golden period — its fine condition and its “unique Hollywood provenance,” he said he expects it to sell in the $15 million to $20 million range.“It could set a record,” he said, noting the emergence of a class of wealthy collectors since the sale of the “Lady Blunt” a decade ago. (Other dealers say there have since been multiple private sales at prices over $20 million.)Baer dismissed the notion that the Hollywood pedigree of the “da Vinci” might curb its value at auction. While he conceded Seidel did not record the most intellectually rigorous music, he added that “the fact he was a Hollywood performer shouldn’t diminish the value at all.”“He was a great classical musician before he came to Hollywood,” Baer added. “And ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is a pretty big deal.” More

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      How Do You Write Down a Scratching, Crunching Violin ‘Chop’?

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      The chop turns string players into beatboxers. After it developed organically over decades, musicians are making new efforts to notate it.Change is hard. All the more so for an old, set-in-its-ways instrument like the violin.But it happens. And in the hands of the five-string fiddler Casey Driessen and the jazz violinist Oriol Saña, change sounds like an unexpected crunch. A scratch. A drag of the bow on the string that ramps up to build an intricate undercurrent of rhythm.How to describe it? “Like a DJ who scratches records,” Driessen offered in an interview. “A little chunky,” Saña said.This small revolution is known as “the chop,” a percussive technique that opens up a new world of rhythm and groove for the bowed string player. The chop turns a violinist into a beatboxer. To play it is to break basic conventions of what most listeners expect from a typically sweet, melodic instrument.For over half a century, musicians around the world have brought the chop to different genres, including bluegrass and jazz, Celtic and funk, far-flung regional traditions and beyond. Composers like Kenji Bunch, Jessica Meyer, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Mimi Rabson have featured it in new works. With all this activity, it has evolved into its own percussive language. This naturally raises the question: how does it get written down?It’s been a long path to trying to notate and codify the chop. “It’s not that often that somebody creates a whole new instrumental technique for the violin and that it actually becomes widespread,” said Laura Risk, a fiddler and assistant professor of music and culture at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who has documented the chop’s diffusion across North Atlantic string communities. “With the chop, it’s so recent and it’s so unusual that we can trace it.”In 1966, the bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene invented the basic chop and put it to work as a showpiece while soloing. It passed to the violinist Darol Anger, who developed it as a tool for backup in the Turtle Island Quartet, a genre-bending jazz group. The chop offered a way to mimic a full rhythm section using only string players.In 1973, Bill Keith, Clarence White, Richard Greene and David Grisman in the bluegrass band Muleskinner.via Richard GreeneIt’s in this form that the technique took off — “dangerously,” Anger has said. “I feel like Oppenheimer sometimes. I’ve released some kind of monster.”He recalls a watershed moment at a music camp in the 1990s, when he offered “Darol’s Chop Shop” to a group of virtuosic young fiddlers eager to discover new sounds. Among them were Driessen and Saña, who have since made chopping central to their musical lives. Driessen has extended the chop’s vocabulary through new moves, even introducing the “triple chop,” which makes a tsk-tsk-tsk triplet, as if calling to a stubborn cat; Saña has brought it to string communities in Europe; and both have passed it on through performance, workshops and online instructional videos.The chop’s spread has been raucous, organic, primarily learned player-to-player; at first glance, inventing a written form for it might seem strange or sacrilegious. Notation is a deliberate act of definition. It’s a bet on standardization in exchange for dissemination. Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Casey DriessenAnger and the Turtle Island Quartet used a simple “x” or a slash in place of the standard notehead to mark different flavors of chop. When the group started publishing their own arrangements, those symbolic choices became quasi-codified, establishing a baseline notation. Two years ago, Saña and Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language. The project is a multimedia mixture of musical glossary, historical record and pedagogical tool.Of course, there is a tension in writing something down. Is a notation a description of a particular musical personality? A set of instructions for someone to follow? “With a score, there is usually leeway for interpretation,” Risk said. “That’s where your own sense of musicality, the style and genre, that’s where all of that comes in.”For Anger, writing at an earlier point in the chop’s development, the simplicity of the symbols was crucial. In its arrangements, the Turtle Island Quartet opted to use the minimal amount of information possible to make space for the somatic experience of the music: listening and feeling. They worried too much detail would muddle the groove, leaving players “dreading their way through a thicket of squiggles,” said Anger.Two years ago, Oriol Saña and Casey Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language.Laura RuizDriessen and Saña debated how to express for players both the location and movement of the bow with precision, while still having the symbols be legible. For composers, software loomed large, with the two men choosing to favor readily available symbols in popular typesetting programs like Sibelius. Elements of taste also shaped how to visually represent a sound, often leaving them comparing which symbols felt “stronger,” “more intuitive” or “crunchier.”Given that the chop was already in widespread use, Driessen and Saña involved the musical community, too, including Greene, Anger and string faculty members at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. One important line of edits came from cellists like Natalie Haas and Mike Block, who pointed out aspects of the notation that they thought were too violin-centric. Driessen and Saña felt things had truly clicked when a colleague told them “it looks like it sounds, which is exactly the way notation should be.”The duo’s notation features a language of compound symbols. Different noteheads mark the quality of the percussive sound, including slashes of varying size for hard and soft chops, and an “x” for the subtle melodic hint of ghost notes. Signifiers for where to chop on the instrument (relative to the player’s body, at the midpoint or beyond the instrument’s bridge) combine with directions for how to move the bow vertically.Other modern chopping moves received their own written forms, taking cues from their corresponding sound and motion. For example, parallel scrapes (which often make a pitchless drag noise) use a headless stroke with a modified arrow indicating their duration and direction of attack. Circular bow scrapes (which sound like a chunky record scratch) resemble an altered “c” to show whether the rotation should be clockwise or counterclockwise.Will writing further spread the chop? The Chop Notation Project has already ended up in the textbook Berklee Contemporary Music Notation, and has been shared with students at gatherings like the Barcelona Fiddle Congress and online. Other chop notation systems continue to circulate, too, which make different choices about the exact information captured in writing and left up to the player.The chop is primarily a “living and evolving aural language,” said Driessen, but both he and Saña believe a standard notation will help find new exponents for its still-transgressive joys.“I teach chops with students who are four years old,” Saña said. “The first time when you teach it, they say, ‘I can do that with my fiddle?’” More