Podcast Appearances
There were the old instruments of various shades of brown and dark amber, some with scratches and obvious repair work.
And then there were the bright new shiny ones.
Only the best for my girl, I thought.
We will have one of those, though I winced at the price tags.
Isabel spent several hours trying out a variety of the shiny models, reluctantly making a selection which we took on approval to Loretto.
After listening to Isabel playing for a few minutes, Loretto, in an aside to her mum, firmly suggested that it would be worth investing in a proper instrument.
This meant a trip back to the violin maker, and yes, you guessed it, this time to make a selection from the set of older instruments.
This changing violins opened up a new world of appreciation of the violin as an object lying somewhere between historical artefact and work of art.
Violins are merely held in trust by a player as musical ambition and interest rises or wanes and then are passed to the next.
On the surface they seem a little bruised and scratched, but are in fact lovingly tended and repaired over decades, even centuries.
The oldest surviving violin was made around 1560 by Andrea Amati in the Italian town of Cremona in Lombardy on the banks of the Po River.
There was something special about Cremona, with the great master luthier Antonio Stradivari setting up a workshop there in 1666, followed by Carlo Borgonzi and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù in the early 18th century.
It is not fully understood why their instruments, in the right hands, produced the quality of sound they are renowned for.
the perfection of form, the local maple wood, even the special varnish used are all advanced as contributory factors.
Whatever the explanation, the instruments made in this epoch are much sought after and played by today's virtuosos.
Nicola Benedetti plays a Stradivarius, Sarah Chang a Guarneri and Nigel Kennedy a Borgonzi.
We eventually settled on a more modest instrument of French origin made by the prize-winning luthier Jérôme Thibaut Villamy around 1911 in Mircourt near Paris, France's comparator town to the more illustrious Cremona.
Today, as our daughter plays, we share her passion, delving into the devilish difficulty of Monty's chardasse.
soaring to the ethereal heights of Mascagny's intermezzo, swooning with the rise and fall of Massonet's Meditation.
The musical waves rush over us and we absorb them, hearing with our whole being, tapping secrecies of the senses, a love, a joy, a sadness, colouring us all silver and gold,