Originally written by Jacek K. on October 24, 2007 3:24 PM [snip] Last January, Gene Weingarten, a Washington Post columnist, persuaded the violinist Joshua Bell to join him in an experiment. Bell was to dress in jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, position himself at the head of the escalator in the L'Enfant Plaza subway station at the height of the morning rush hour, open his violin case, take out his $3.5 million Stradivarius, launch into Bach's D-minor Chaconne for solo violin, and see what happened. Nothing much happened. People hurrying to work hurried by.

Well, I listened to that very same Strad played by Joshua Bell last night, but wasn't impressed by it as much as I was by the one which belongs Anne-Sophie Mutter...

The history of Joshua Bell's Strad is amazing though:

The Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius of 1713 is an antique violin fabricated by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona. The Gibson, while owned by [the Jewish Polish violinist]  Bronisław Huberman, was stolen twice. The first time the violin was returned shortly after the theft; the second theft, by musician Julian Altman, occurred on the evening of 28 February 1936, backstage at Carnegie Hall, while Huberman performed with his Guarnerius of 1731. Though Huberman never saw the Gibson again, the instrument was recovered 50 years later, in 1985, as a result of Altman's deathbed confession to his wife that he had stolen the violin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Stradivarius

I forgot to add that the Brahms concerto Joshua Bell played last night in Warsaw was the same that the previous owner of this very violin, Bronisław Huberman,

played before Brahms himself 113 years ago:

Dvorak heard the boy play and presented him with an autograph “In friendly remembrance of the little, though great artist.” By the end of January excitement was so intense, everybody of musical significance in the city had heard of the Huberman phenomena. For the 29 January concert at the GroßeMusikvereinssaal Huberman was to play the Brahms concerto. The audience that night contained such celebrities as Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, Alfred Grünfeld, Hans Richter, Eduard Hanslick, Count Hohenlowe, Karl Goldmark, Ferdinand Löwe, Eusebius Mandyczewski, Johann Strauss, and the composer himself, Johannes Brahms.

Brahms was expecting to hear a student like performance of the work. In the words of his biographer, Max Kalbeck:

“As soon as Brahms heard the sound of the violin, he pricked up his ears, during the Andante he wiped his eyes, and after the Finale he went into the green room, embraced the young fellow, and stroked his cheeks. When Huberman complained that the public applauded after the cadenza, breaking into the lovely Cantilena, Brahms replied, ‘You should not have played the cadenza so beautifully.’ ”

Brahms brought him a photo of his, with the inscription “To Bronislaw Huberman so that he may kindly remember Vienna, February 1896, and his grateful listener J. Brahms.” The musical quotation is the opening of the slow movement of the concerto. Hanslick wrote “In the face of such transcendent genius, criticism as such ceases,” and Schwarz tells us that the composer Carl Goldmark entered into Huberman’s album, “Now I begin to believe in the wonders of the Bible.” http://www.huberman.info/biography/brahms/

Nice fidelity, dumb slideshow (yes, yes...aren't they all...).

What a delightful presentation of Monty's Czardash!

Maxi