WANTED: Music-loving patron willing to buy rare, high-quality Stradivari violin to lend to deserving young Chicago violinist to help further her concert career. Asking price: $1.5 million. Inquire: Stradivari Society.
Rachel Barton tucks the 1703 Stradivari violin under her chin, positions her bow over the strings and begins to play. The practice studio comes alive with the strains of Pablo de Sarasate’s “Carmen Fantasy,” a kitschy showpiece filled with the most fiendishly difficult gimcracks only the top fiddle virtuosi can make music of.
Barton is one of them. Playing from a wheelchair is no problem for the 21-year-old violinist. Her sound is the aural equivalent of how a Chateau d’Yquem wine sits on the palate. Powerful, yet velvety smooth, it has magnificent bite as well as that hard-to-define quality violinists call charisma.
Barton ends the work with a flourish. She contemplates the russet finish of the “Maximilian Joseph” Strad for a moment before carefully consigning it to its case. The instrument, priced at $1.5 million, has to be returned to its owner, an anonymous private collector, in about one month. The donor had contracted to lend it to Barton for one year and soon the year will be over.
“It’s like a summer romance where you know you must go separate ways at the end of August,” Barton sighs. “So you make the most of it.”
Although the patron may decide to renew his or her option on the instrument, allowing it to remain in Barton’s possession another year, friends of the enormously gifted Chicago violinist are working to make her “summer romance” with the Strad a full-time affair.
Putting some of the world’s finest, and most expensive, violins in the hands of performers who can’t afford them is the mission of Chicago’s Stradivari Society, co-founded in 1989 by former Motorola CEO Robert Galvin, his wife Mary and Geoffrey Fushi of the Chicago instrument dealers Bein & Fushi. All three are among Barton’s biggest fans.
The non-profit Stradivari Society operates on the principle of interchange between patron and performer, a principle that goes back to the time of the Medicis. As members of the Society, patrons such as the Galvins must be willing to put up at least $1.5 million for a violin to be lent to a performer such as Barton, with the proviso that the musician pay the insurance premiums and give at least two command performances a year for his or her patron.
For the patron, such an acquisition is both a gilt-edged investment and an aesthetic reward. Of the 1,200 violins created by the Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari, only about 630 remain, along with about 50 cellos and as few as 10 violas. According to Fushi, prices for top-quality violins have risen from around $1.25 million a decade ago to as much as $5 million.
Matching the right player with the right instrument is important, and it’s because Barton and the “Maximilian Joseph” Strad are so obviously well suited for one another that the Society is making an extraordinary effort to find a buyer willing to lend her the violin on which she makes such heavenly music. Says Barton: “You fall in love with a fiddle. It’s such a personal thing, you don’t want to just give it away (to someone else).”
Given the medical expenses she and her family face, Barton is hardly in a position to purchase the instrument herself. Even before the Metra train accident Jan. 16, 1995, that interrupted her promising career, she never owned a really fine violin; instead, she played on borrowed instruments and what she calls a “junk fiddle I could play in the rain.”
On that fateful winter morning, Barton was exiting the Metra train when the doors closed on the violin case strapped to her back. The case contained another fine, million-dollar instrument, a 1617 Amati, also lent to her by the Society. She was dragged several hundred feet. The accident cost Barton her left leg and mangled her right leg, necessitating numerous operations since then. Recently she was fitted with a prosthetic device and is using a walker, although she practices and performs sitting in a wheelchair.
The first time Barton walked in public was in April for the Chicago Bulls-Miami Heat playoff game at the United Center, where she performed her arrangement of the national anthem before a live and TV audience of millions. The instrument on which she played “The Star-Spangled Banner” was the same 1703 Strad the Society hopes to secure for her regular use.
She had played the anthem at a playoff game the previous year on her other violin, the 1617 Amati. This year, she says, even members of the public who had never heard a violin before thought her performance was better than the year before.
“What they didn’t realize,” says Barton, laughing, “was that it wasn’t the performance, but the violin.”
The Stradivari Society considers itself a facilitator, matching the right instrument with the right violinist and right patron at the right price. A Strad violin of this quality at $1.5 million is a relative bargain as such instruments go, says Fushi, who last year sold the 1723 Stradivari now used by Russian virtuoso Maxim Vengerov to patron Clement R. Arrison, president of Mark IV Industries, for close to $3 million.
Great violins are not like great works of art–they were never meant to be hung on a wall or locked up under glass. Any instrument will lose its tone if it isn’t played regularly; conversely, an instrument gains in value the more it is used. Hence the highly complex mating rituals performed by the Stradivari Society on behalf of the 20 violins in its collection (no violas or cellos yet).
All 20 are presently on loan to violinists around the world. Among current recipients are violinists Gil Shaham, Maria Bachmann, Elisa Barston, Jennifer Koh and Vengerov.
“We see the Stradivari Society as a kind of Art Institute of great instruments,” explains Fushi, who arranged for the violinist Midori to buy the Guarneri she had borrowed from Mary Galvin at “less than half the (unspecified) going price.
“We make sure these instruments are preserved and cared for, and that the people who have invested in them and later may wish to donate them to the Society can feel secure they will be worth far more than the patrons paid for them. It’s an alternative investment in the arts,” he adds.
For a major career-track artist such as Barton, that investment can make a crucial difference.
“As a young violin player, you are held back in your career if you are playing on an inferior instrument that doesn’t let you produce the best possible sound,” she says. “On the other hand, until you get a good career going, there’s no way you can possibly afford one yourself. It’s a Catch-22 situation.”
So: Any takers?
The Stradivari Society plans to present a private recital by Barton within the next few weeks for those who may be interested in purchasing the Stradivari violin on which she currently performs. Phone Insa Blanke of the Society at 312-663-1214 or 312-663-0150.
WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE VIOLINS
The art of violin-making reached its peak with the instruments produced by Italian craftsmen Antonio Stradivari and Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu.
Stradivari was born in Cremona, Italy, in 1644 and died there in 1737, at 93. His first known violin was from 1666, his last from the year of his death. Guarneri (1698-1744) produced his first instrument during the mid-1720s and his last in 1744. “Stradivarius” and “Guarnerius” are the Latinized forms of their names, found on labels inside their instruments according to the custom of the period.
The value of the following violins ranges from $3 million to $6 million. They are listed in approximate order of market worth, highest first, followed by date of manufacture, the instrument’s nickname and the current owner’s name.
Nicknames typically refer to celebrated violinists and other owners: The “Wieniawski” Guarneri refers to the Polish composer-virtuoso Henryk Wieniawski, “Dushkin” to violinist Samuel Dushkin and so forth. The appellation “Ruby” refers to the color of varnish used on the instrument.
1. Stradivari, 1714, “Soil,” violinist Itzhak Perlman.
2. Stradivari, 1714, “General Kyd,” private collector on the West Coast.
3. Stradivari, 1708, “Ruby,” the Stradivari Society of Chicago.
4. Stradivari, 1722, “Jupiter,” violinist Midori.
5. Stradivari, 1710, “Lord Dunraven,” violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter.
6. Stradivari, 1715, “Alard,” private collector.
7. Guarneri del Gesu, 1737, “King Joseph,” private collector in England.
8. Guarneri del Gesu, 1742, “Lord Wilton,” violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
9. Guarneri del Gesu, 1742, “Wieniawski,” Bein & Fushi of Chicago.
10. Guarneri del Gesu, 1736, “Sennhauser,” Stradivari Society.
11. Guarneri del Gesu, 1741, “Kochanski,” violinist Aaron Rosand.
12. Guarneri del Gesu, 1739, “Spanish-Kortschak,” private collector in Midwest.
13. Stradivari, 1736, “Muntz,” private collector in Midwest.
14. Guarneri del Gesu, 1742, “Dushkin,” violinist Pinchas Zukerman.
Source: Geoffrey Fushi, Bein & Fushi
