Friday, July 13, 2007

The sound of a $ 10,000,000 violin-how do you price a violin anyway?


Composer and violinist Jon Rose questions if a violin is worth millions of dollars and asks if the quality of sound warrants this type of price tag;

"As any honest violin dealer will tell you (and there are a few) the sound of a violin can be priced in a range from $50 (bad, but playable), to $10,000 (good-sounding) to $20,000 (extremely good tone and projection) to $100,000 (simply over-priced). The rest is snotty-nosed hubris. As has been proven on a number of occasions, most notably by the BBC in 1975, a well-made, top modern violin can sound just as good if not better than the prized golden age models. In a recording studio, behind a screen, the violins of Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman and Charles Beare were played back to them. The instruments were a Strad, a Guarneri del Gesu, a Vuillaume, and a Ronald Praill (a modern instrument less than a year old). None of the esteemed violin experts really had a clue which violin was which. Furthermore, two of them couldn't even tell which was their own instrument. They were left mumbling platitudes about the personal relationship between fiddle and player - bloody obvious if you spend most years of your life playing the violin.

Fast forward to a new century of spurious violin evaluation, and who was the expert London dealer who dumped this multi-million dollar wunder violin on the Australian fish in their barrel? Why, none other than Charles Beare, the violin dealer and expert who on the BBC blindfold test had trouble telling the difference between a Strad, a Guarneri del Gesu, a Vuillaume and a Ronald Praill. As my partner, US violinist and composer Hollis Taylor will tell you, a violin dealer like Beare will not even look at a great sounding violin unless it has the correct nametag. How very contemporary, it's the name not the content that counts.

In 2003, the Texas A & M University biochemist and amateur violin maker Nagyvary set up a blind test duel between one of his recently finished instruments, and a Strad. On the Prokofiev Violin Sonata in D, 57 music experts picked the Strad, 129 were not sure, and 290 got it plain wrong (in the sense that they picked the modern instrument over the Strad.

A blind test took place in Sweden two years ago in which three modern Swedish violins were compared to a Stradivarius, a Gagliano, and a Guadagnini. The six instruments were played by two professionals and judged by members of the European String Teachers' Association. A modern Westerlund violin got the top score; the Strad came last.


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