Our Thoughts after the Concert
Our preference is instrumental music. But I do visit good opera occasionally too.
Voices of well trained classical singers fill up biggest halls without any amplification.
That’s amazing. I cannot see that happening at a pop or rock concert. I asked some friends as well. None of us could remember such an event – they simply couldn’t do without artificial help.
No doubt, violin was created to imitate a woman soprano voice (bel canto) as much as possible. It is well known that Italy is a country where classical singing as well as violins originated.
So, it is well known for centuries, that good violin must:
- sound loudly in big halls (good projection)
- sound equally from lowest to highest notes
- have easy response to every bow touch
The only significant difference in the sound created by good violins is timbre. That phenomenon was described by Maestro Ruggiero Ricci, who played the violins, created by the best Cremona makers in a CD “The Glory of Cremona”:
Good violins, like good wines… each has its individual character. The differences between them are sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, but always discernible if one has the opportunity to compare them under controlled conditions. Even the best violin in terms of history, quality or value, does not best fulfill the demands of all music. It is impossible to find one instrument which is at the same time dark, brilliant, open, nasal, sweet, etc. The best a violinist can do is to find an instrument which most nearly suits his individual temperament. Thus, the instrument itself plays an important part in what audience have come to associate as the ‘sound’ of a performer.
You can read more about historical conditions in an article ‘The Glory of Cremona‘ and the CD recording conditions in a separate article.
Over more than ten years of working with violin family instruments I neither saw nor heard a cheap factory-made instrument that sounded as well as a good master created one.
These are our personal thoughts on what it takes to produce a good violin.