Lara St. John (Image credit: James Jarley)
 

The title “character” in The Red Violin—a perfect, red-colored instrument—inspires passion, making its way through several owners and countries over three centuries. In anticipation of the performance, we thought it would be fun to hear from some musicians about the provenance of and their relationship to their own instruments.


Here are a few words from the artists who played them.

 

Lara St. John, violin soloist in The Red Violin screening:

The 1779 Guadagnini (Turin) I have played on for the past 17 years has a story similar to The Red Violin. It came to the American continent in the 1920s as a gift from a father to his young son, who was studying with Efrem Zimbalist and performed at the Hollywood Bowl. Unfortunately, he contracted tuberculosis and died at 17, and his heartbroken father entombed him with this Guadagnini and some bows. A few years later during the Depression, the family needed money, so the violin was brought out and sold, but it’s a very poignant story nevertheless. It’s on loan to me thanks to an anonymous donor.


 

Wu Man on the 2013 airline incident that destroyed her custom-made pipa:

An instrument is a life, not a piece of luggage. My other pipa had been with me for 18 years and basically established my music career in the United States. Right after it was broken, when I told Man Rui Xing (the master instrument craftsman) in Beijing the story, he was very cool—he said, “Don’t worry, I will make you a new one.” There is a space in my heart for my old pipa. It’s like a relationship between two people, the instrument and yourself. But the new one had a new sound and a different quality that I was excited to try. We get along very well now.


 

Geraldine Walther, violist for the Takács Quartet:

When I joined the quartet 12 years ago, I had been playing on a beautiful instrument on loan to me by the San Francisco Symphony that I knew I would have to return. So the Takács Quartet managed to find a beautiful Guadagnini viola for me that came from an amateur player’s great collection. I have since learned this viola was used by the acclaimed English violist Watson Forbes, in the London-based Aeolian Quartet during the 1930s and 1940s. All that spring, after I had won the job, that viola sat in its case looking at me, wondering when I would get to know it. It needed another visit to the workshop to be just right for me, and now, from being a stranger, it has become a real friend or me onstage and off in times of slight panic as well as great euphoria.


 

William Skeen, cellist with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra:

Most players aren’t able to know much of the backstory to their instrument, but I know something about mine. Built in the late 17th century as a five-string cello, this instrument probably lived much of its life as a normal four-string cello. Cellos with five strings, though relatively common in the 17th and early 18th centuries, had fallen out of fashion by the end of the 18th century. It must have been at this point that the instrument lost its fifth string. By the early 20th century, it seems that the instrument was in the hands of a Jewish family. This unnamed family fled Europe in the 1930s and arrived in America, and the cello was unfortunately forgotten and left to deteriorate in a closet. Andrew Dipper, a Minnesota-based luthier, bought the pieces in the 1970s and, after several years, decided to piece it back together. As he studied the wood, Dipper noticed that in an earlier time the cello had indeed had ten peg holes. He knew that he just had to reconstruct this beautiful and voluptuous wooden body back into its original five-string form. What he ended up with was such a superb specimen. In the early 1990s, it was put up for auction in Los Angeles, where a good friend and appraiser took one look at it and paid for it outright. Eventually turning away from performing and toward business, this friend decided to sell the cello to me in 2007. I have never been so charmed by a musical instrument, and I look forward to the day when another young cellist can fall for it, too!  


 

Related Event: Dec 8
Memorial Auditorium
The Red Violin - Screening with Live Orchestra

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