A new collection of specially commissioned unantiqued instruments offers hope of a new Zeitgeist around modern violins. Will top soloists catch on? This article was first published in the May issue of Classical Music magazine, and is posted with permission. How should we feel for Frank Peter Zimmermann, who has had to give up the 1711 'Lady Inchiquin' Stradivarius violin he has played since 2002? He had it on loan from a German bank which is being wound up by financial servic

Facebook just kindly reminded me that two years ago today I was in Sarasota, Florida, enjoying the La Musica Festival, and tasting wine – in the name of research, of course. Here's the blog I wrote for The Strad, in April 2013: I’ve taken part in a few violin blind tests in my time, but yesterday evening I experienced my first wine one, as part of the La Musica chamber music festival in Sarasota, Florida. It was billed as an Old World, New World exploration, with six wines in

In honour of Pinchas Zukerman's performance tonight of the Elgar Violin Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London's Southbank Centre, I thought I'd republish an interview I did with him while I was at The Strad, as it was one of my favourites. I was interviewing him for a tribute to luthier René Morel for the February 2012 issue, but Zukerman was in chatty mood and said some wonderful and thought-provoking things about violins and musical attitudes: Pinchas Zuk

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

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 discovered this tirade in a seminal string pedagogical work: 'It is most regrettable that our present-day instrument-makers take so little trouble with the finish of their work. (Most instrument-makers, it is true, work nowadays merely for their bread, and in one respect cannot be blamed. People demand good work and pay little for it.) And what is more, each works away according to his own notions and his fancy, without justification for either one or the other... They all