Tarisio auction house was incredibly generous recently and gave me some alone time with something quite special: the newly discovered "Folinari" Guarneri del Gesu violin of 1725. This was the second time playing a del Gesu and it took me a while to digest the incredibleness of the whole experience. Several days, in fact. I felt pretty lucky and the violin was very much as enchanting as I expected it would be. What contributed to its mystique was the impossible story bundled with it. In the 1990s, the estate of a third-rate winery in Italy discovered that the violin which had been passed on down through the centuries was non other than a bone fide early-period del Gesu. Though the label is not original, there are scribbles inside attesting to its date and maker. It must have been a labor of love for the first appraiser to validate its authenticity; most fine violins have prolific provenances.

Guarneri del Gesu was, and I say still is, the violinist's (ultimate) maker. Even more than Stradivari (who could be anointed perhaps as the maker's maker), del Gesu violins have always appealed to master players with few exceptions. In fact, all my violin heroes played on del Gesus for most of their careers (Kreisler, Paganini, Kogan, Heifetz, Ysaye). Back in the golden era of violin-making in Cremona Italy, living down the street from renown maker Antonio Stradivari was Guarneri del Gesu. He was the go-to maker if you weren't some Earl, Duke or Prince. If you were a violinist, you would go to him. And while Strads are incredible violins, and he an incredible master, there is something appealing to me about del Gesu. Strad was an expert craftsman, experimenter, scientist -- no doubt -- but he seemed to play it safe for the majority of his prolific career. While he cozied-up with his Grand pattern during his "golden period" from around 1700 until the year he died in 1737, del Gesu was thinking out of the box. del Gesu was on a mission to explore. Changing his designs radically, both as he progressed through the decades, and even between single instruments in fact, he never hung up his hat and phoned it in. The dimensions of his violins swing drastically. And probably most notably, he threw out the book on sound-holes (or f-holes). While the f-holes of this early 1725 violin are very "straddy" (round, supple, feminine, divine; a design derived from the father of the violin: Andrea Amati), they resemble nothing like his later design. All in all, he was an innovator and hacker -- and I can really get behind that.

The 1725 del Gesu played remarkably well (being in such an impeccable state of preservation probably didn't hurt). The D string was most remarkable. It served as the base from which the higher A and E strings derived their timbre. The G string was a bit of a mystery to me. There was something unique about it but it was hard to pinpoint what it was. What really made my day was the fiddle's response when I cranked up the volume. Yes, violin is a cantilena instrument, but the modern player should be able to go as huge or as quiet as he/she wants, without any loss of purity of sound. I am a big guy and I can get a lot of sound when I want to, and this del Gesu just could not be overwhelmed. The more I asked of it, the more it gave back and there seemed to be no ceiling. I am assuming this is what Paganini loved about his "Canon" del Gesu, which he aptly nicknamed "The Law." Violinist Ruggiero Ricci, one of the only Americans to ever have played the "Cannon", remarked that it was by far the largest thing he had every seen (which goes back to my earlier points regarding del Gesu: the wild experimenter).

In sum, it was one of those best-days-ever. It is such a treat to live in NYC where opportunities like this are common-place. And I have to say that the folks down at Tarisio -- Ethan, Jason, Carlos, et al -- are the absolute nicest people in the biz. The auction for the violin will be held in London and it's so very difficult to estimate what something so priceless could fetch. Guarneri del Gesus are scarce: there are only 150~ violins in known existence (no 'celli nor viol are known to exist at all) to Stradivari's some 600. And its condition is another factor which could send the hammer price into the stratosphere. In the past, I have made some decent educated guesses (e.g. I was within a million USD and change for the Lady Blunt Strad hammer price -- not bad!) so I will make a spirited wager and say that the "Folinari" Guarneri del Gesu violin of 1725 will go for 12 million USD.

Photo taken by Grace O'Connell

I have decided that my fugues project is a costly one (to record professionally). It would have been nice to commission an engineer, book a hall, and record a nice set of this great repertoire. But I discovered that to record this set would cost me upward of 6K USD. What is that in classical musician dollars? YIKES!!

A fun project all the same. http://nato.cc/fugues-a-mess/

I had a great time over at Tarisio auction house recently. I wanted to measure-up Samuel Zygmuntowicz' Plowden copy juxtaposed to my Jan Spidlen one. It was easy to instantly appreciate the incredible violin which Sam had made (for violinist Ruggiero Ricci). And my intention was not to have a Coke vs. Pepsi challenge between Sam and Jan but, rather, appreciate both modern maker's approach to del Gesu's Plowden. Sam wins points for making his attempt look antiqued on top of sounding great, I must say. 

With regards to antiquing, I have moved from camp A to camp B in the last couple of years. It's neat to antique, but I find something dis-ingenious about quoting the originals to the finest decimal place. Yes, antiquing is currently very much en-vogue; when I pow-wow'd with Jeff Phillips (like Sam, also a gold winner at VSA) about this matter last year, the craft of antiquing was one of the very intrigues of violin making which drew him in. I suppose violins which look like stop-signs are one gangly extreme, whilst quoting originals is the other.

But I digress. Both the Zyg 'cello and violin were fantastic! And the new owners of them certainly have voted with their wallets on just how special they truly are! The 'cello hammer price was 70K USD and the violin 90. Ninety thousand dollars for a violin made in Brooklyn, NY less than 20 years ago. Yup, times are a-changing. But this is what the violin trade needs (in my humble opinion). We need to bring discipline to the antiques market on the backs of modern luthiers. Ricci himself has spoken at length regarding the violin, the violinist, and the modern luthier. The new Stradivaris who walk amongst us are a blessing: thank you Jan, Sam, Curtin, Jeff, Robin -- just to name a few.

Photo taken by Grace O'Connell

These mock-recordings have been fun and certainly got me excited for the near future where I will be recording them at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. They should be pretty polished by then. Stay tuned here for the final release of that. I will also make these final recordings available for download, too, as there is no better way to commute to work blaring solo violin fugues (of course!).

The Bartok fugue is located on the main row, two from the end on the right:

http://nato.cc/fugues-a-mess

Interesting: Tarisio is selling an ex-Ricci Sam Zygmuntowicz violin. The violin is a copy, coincidentally, of Guarneri del Gesu's "Plowden" from 1735. It has a lot of similarities (visually) to my Jan Spidlen although Jan likes to take it easy on the antiquing (something which Sam, conversely, takes no prisoners with). Sam Zygmuntowicz made waves a few years back, at the same auction house no less, when a couple of his Strad copies (ex-Stern i.e. Isaac Stern) fetched astronomical hammer prices well over 100K USD. This was and still is uncommon, but it goes to show how en-vogue these modern makers have become.

I was taken aback when I read this 1995 Zygy was for sale; it being an ex-Ricci. I jumped the gun and assumed Maestro Ricci had just passed away! But I cannot find any news of such. Thankfully. I had a really touching phone conversation with Ricci just last year. And his wife Julia informed me that he, despite being in his 90s, still remains quite unstoppable (though he does not play any more). Ricci and I chatted a bit about his glissando methodology (an amazing forensic discovery), about some of his students, and best of all, he shared some of his sacred violin heuristics (go figure, slow practice was at the top of the list).

I don't expect this Zygy to fetch anything close to that of the ex-Sterns. But I would love to be proven wrong; not only to celebrate our modern luthier masters but also in celebration of the great Ruggiero Ricci.