Highly Strung
The Sunday Times - March 4 2007
Jasper Rees explains how violinists deal with the prohibitive prices of top-notch instruments.
There are more than 600 Stradivarius violins in existence. Slotted into narrow, felt-lined pigeonholes in the bowels of a Georgian town house north of Oxford Street, London, are no fewer than seven of them. This is the premises of J&A Beare Ltd, junction box of much of the serious trade in important stringed instruments. It’s a very British institution, but not all of these Strads, nor the 1731 del Gesù also stored here, are likely to remain in this country. With a few exceptions — Nigel Kennedy owns a del Gesù — most violinists have been priced out of the market for leading instruments made by Antonio Stradivari and his fellow Cremonese, Giuseppe Guarneri “del Gesù”. Instead, they rely on patronage to get their hands on a good instrument. With the market still hotting up, there are serious implications.
“There has been pressure on prices throughout the world,” says Steven Smith, a former violinist who now runs the violin side of Beare’s business. “People want their kids to play classical musical instruments; economies are booming. In the past 15 to 20 years, foundations have sprung up that will buy these instruments and support the artist by lending them more and more. But it doesn’t happen in the UK to any great degree, unfortunately. Young British violinists struggle to achieve the level of instrument they need.”
Violins, even more than other stringed instruments, occupy a unique place in the auction-house market. Their value as antiques rises each year, but they are also highly sought after as tools of the trade. Except in specialist period-instrument ensembles such as the Academy of Ancient Music, the woodwind and brass instruments used for orchestral performance have evolved into their current guise after centuries of technological improvement, and period wind instruments have no significant market value. Violins, violas and cellos, however, have not been improved on since Stradivari made his first known violin, in 1666.
That very violin is on loan to So-Ock Kim, the brilliant 24-year-old Korean-British violinist who has just been signed by Sony BMG, and it is sitting on the table between us. She points to the features that identify it as an early Strad — the petite soundbox and stubby cornering, not to mention the label inside the violin: “Alumnus Amati, faciebat anno 1666.” Stradivari would go on making violins for 70 years — the instruments from 1700 to the 1730s are regarded as among his finest. But this early Strad has a unique place among the 650 extant instruments: the label visible through one of the F-holes supplies the only known documentary evidence linking Stradivari to the luthier to whom he was thought to have been apprenticed, Nicolo Amati. In any other field, this priceless antique would be behind glass in a museum. Instead, it’s a working instrument, and is about to go on tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom Kim is playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.
She first came into contact with Charles Beare as a nine-year-old. “I was doing the Tchaikovsky in the Festival Hall. It was my first big concerto in London, and I needed something that was going to project. I walked into the shop and I played something, and was given a wonderful quarter-sized Storioni.”
Beare has helped to supply her with violins ever since. Having won the Shell/LSO competition at 15, she was loaned a Guarneri fiddle from the Worshipful Company of Musicians for several years. “Then I needed to give that back and I was without a violin, and I thought: panic. I got a letter from Mr Beare saying that he had found a sponsor who’d bought this violin to be used by a soloist, and would I like to come and play on it? Three days later, I was playing the Beethoven concerto at Bridgewater Hall, in Manchester. It sounded great in there.”
Such an arrangement is much more common in mainland Europe, Japan and Korea and now Australia. In January, an anonymous benefactor paid £3.6m for a 1743 del Gesu to be given on long-term loan to the Australian Chamber Orchestra. And things are only going to get harder. The stock diminishes for two reasons. “Every year, we see some instruments that are damaged,” Smith says. And the increasing presence of banks and private collectors is taking instruments out of circulation. “It’s not a bad thing to have collectors, because it preserves them for the future.” Smith says. “The most crucial thing is that they are looked after properly. If they’re looked after for the next 300 years, I expect them to be playable. But, generally speaking, they should be played.
