Responses to my post about Menuhin's vibrato drew a mixture of responses. I’d remarked on it being ‘perfectly shaped’ and ‘fluid’ and many loved it, but some people disagreed, saying it was too tight and fast, and hated it. I wasn’t sure what to think, so I went to the magical library that is the internet to find out. Where better place to learn about vibrato than from Leopold Auer, the legendary teacher of Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein, Jascha Heifetz and Toscha Zeidel, amon

I came across this lovely film while on my research into classical artists who have explored other genres. It's beautiful to watch the interaction as Perlman meets these klezmer musicians for the first time. At this point he's only been learning about klezmer for a couple of weeks, and at first he makes awkward jokes about playing classical repertoire, including a joke about his Strad ('When he made this fiddle did he ever imagine it would play klezmer?'). He looks pretty unc

I'm currently researching an article for Sinfini Music about violin stars who branch out into other styles, and came across this wonderful footage of a concert at the Verbier Festival, which I was actually lucky enough to go to back in 2007. Joshua Bell teamed up with sitar player Anoushkar Shankar, and the results were mesmerising. Maybe the inflections and language aren't quite how someone born in the tradition might speak them, but you can't deny Bell's commitment to the m

My latest interview for Cozio, with violinist James Ehnes, has just gone live, so please go and visit. He had so much to say about his experience playing some of the finest violins ever made that I couldn’t fit all of it into the interview there, so I saved some of the more philosophical questions for here. I’ve previously made the point that I don’t think everyone deserves to play a Strad and that in my experience there are many people playing them who definitely don't. How

The British Pathé YouTube archive is proving to be a charming source of films about the violin, in all its forms. Here is a soundless video from 1926, 'Trained Fingers', starring the dashing Albert Sammons. You might start to feel a little queasy around 1:24, when the special Ostrovsky training device comes out and Sammons puts his fingers in. The invention for double-stops looks a little less torturous, but does it really beat good old scales? Or is it tendinitis waiting to

I just came across this delightful footage on the British Pathé YouTube channel. It shows a class of 'budding Kreislers' from 1940 learning on a special instrument designed by John Brown, with mandolin like tuning pegs to make it easier for them to tune: rather like the systems that have recently come on to the market. The bows too are designed to make it easier for children to learn the correct position. 'They are becoming masters at what is known as technique,' says the ann

Amid the commemorations of the start of the First World War, you might like a bit of respectful levity, so here is Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms. It's one of my favourite films, made at a point where Chaplin was peaking, with a perfect balance of sheer inventiveness and just the right amount of sentiment. Before he was a little too nasty and liable to kick people in the ass and leer at ladies; after he increasingly tended to the cloying. But in 1918, when he made Shoulder A

You probably didn’t know that my mother was also a journalist – the apple never falls far from the tree, as they say. She was the Newsweek correspondent at the United Nations in the 60s, as you can read in her compelling 2012 autobiography, Don’t Ask Me Where I Come From. But I only recently discovered that in 1981, she wrote an article about my first violin teacher, Sheila Nelson. Sheila, now 78 and retired, is one of the most respected pedagogues of her generation. Starting

One of my aims with this website is to be a non-denominational space where all forms of string music are equally respected and appreciated. I believe that’s the way the world is going – barriers between music styles around the world are falling, (just as political tribalism is taking hold – but that’s for someone else’s website). As Chris Thile says here: ‘You’ll see so much genre-hopping in the near future that it’ll cease to be genre-hopping. The walls will be so worn that

I’m just back from Womad: three days of camping in a field and listening to music from all over the world. I’m sunburnt and have sore feet, and never have I been so pleased to see my bed and toilet. But it was worth it for the sheer quantity and variety of music I had a chance to listen to, even if, with seven stages to choose from, I was sometimes quite overwhelmed and had to go and lie under a bush to cool down. There weren’t many string acts to report back on, but the few

The First World War began 100 years ago, on 28 July 2014, with Austria–Hungary declaring war on Serbia, a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. I have always been fascinated by the era and at school studied the gut-wrenching poetry that came out of the trenches. I was also a little bit obsessed by the mathematics of time and by working out whether it was possible for the old soldiers to be alive

At first I thought this New Yorker article about the Carpenter family by Rebecca Mead was going to be a puff piece, but it turns out to be a pretty thorough exposition of the high-end stringed instrument market, quoting many of the big names in that world. The article alludes to some of the underlying issues in the business, without necessarily focusing on them. You get a sense of the fierce ambition and sales skills required to try to sell instruments at this level – usualll

I heard this band on in the background playlist at the Green Note in Camden last week and had to stop my conversation, I was so captivated. They are Genticorum and they're from Canada. Their arrangements are just lovely, rich but delicate, and the fiddle player, Pascal Gemme, has a beautiful tone and a precision technique. Here's something to tap your foot to: #violin #fiddle #folk #playing #blog #view

If you've been trying to notch up 10,000 hours of practice in the hope of being deemed talented, spurred on by Malcolm Gladwell's rule formluated in his book Outliers, then wait up a moment. According to new research reported on today in the New York Times, 'practice time explains about 20 percent to 25 percent of the difference in performance in music, sports and games like chess'. This doesn't surprise me. As ever, there's so much more context required in understanding tale

I don't speak French well but it doesn't matter when watching this video. It's worth it just to see a young Ivry Gitlis play, talk, charm... #gitlis #stradivarius #violin #violinist #playing #blog

A really interesting article about wine in the New Yorker suggests striking parallels between how we choose wine and our attitudes to instruments, demonstrating the subjectivity and inconsistency with which we demonstrate preferences. The author, Maria Konnikova, recounts taking part in Daniel Salzman's experiment. Salzman offers participants two different wines. One he says is more expensive than the other, and he explains its artisanal production techniques. The author admi

I just came across this lovely interview with mandolin super-hero Chris Thile. Thile came to fame as a Bluegrass player but in recent years has played jazz and classical – his recording of Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas is one of my favourites, and when I interviewed him once he told me how he practises the Barber and Beethoven violin concertos for fun. So it’s unsurprising to hear him talk about how he doesn’t see any essential difference between genres – it’s all the sa

I came late to the Kleiber party – I was introduced to him only recently by Burton Kaplan while I was on his Magic Mountain music course. The whole class watched a documentary on Kleiber and then his performances of Strauss, Beethoven and Brahms. I was mesmerised. Kaplan was trying to demonstrate to us the musical logic of Kleiber's conducting, but also the narrative quality of his rehearsal technique, to show us how this could inform our own musical conceptions. As you can s

Research has begun on my list of top 20 violinists for Sinfini Music. Now I’m not a big fan of definitive lists of anything, as I once wrote in this blog when I was at The Strad. But I’m not pretending that this is a definitive list of the best violinists ever, because that would be untrue and stupid. It is, however, a list of players I consider special, whose playing has touched me in some way. And it does give a lovely chance to sit down and listen to some of the players I

I'm just back from Wigmore Hall, where I watched the Kopelman Quartet demonstrate chamber music playing at its best: exquisite refinement, complete togetherness, impeccable attention to detail. All with their lustrous sound and a whole lot of humour, although possibly a wee bit comfortable. And watching the Russian bow hold in action is a whole violin lesson in itself. It's interesting to me that Russian players rarely use the palette one associates with Russian music - the P