Aida Stucki

Aida Stucki was a Swiss violinist and teacher born (in Cairo, Egypt) on February 19, 1921.  She was a concert violinist who, like countless others, settled down to a teaching career, although she continued to perform as a soloist and chamber musician even as she taught many world class violinists.  One of her teachers was Stefi Geyer, Bela Bartok’s beloved muse.  Another was Carl Flesch.  She began violin lessons at age 10, with Ernst Wolters, concertmaster of the Winterthur (Switzerland) Symphony Orchestra.  Stucki made her public debut at age 13, playing Mozart’s third concerto, although I don’t know where it took place – I’m guessing either Winterthur or Zurich, Switzerland.  Stucki’s concertizing career began in 1940.  She was 19 years old.  She began teaching at the Winterthur Conservatory in 1948.  In 1959, she founded a string quartet with her violinist-husband, Giuseppe Piraccini.  The two would often trade places, alternatively playing first or second violin.  As far as I know, the first string quartet to regularly alternate first and second violin parts between violinists was the Jacobsohn String Quartet – it was founded in Chicago in (approximately) 1890.  Stucki frequently partnered with pianist (and violinist) Clara Haskil to perform as a duo.  Nevertheless, Haskil also performed with other violinists, including Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, Henryk Szeryng, Eugene Ysaye, George Enesco, and Arthur Grumiaux.  In 1983, Stucki fell and broke both of her wrists.  She had to stop concertizing but continued teaching.  She left a substantial discography which is easy to find on the internet.  Among her many hundreds of students are Manrico Padovani, Anne Sophie Mutter, Noemi Schindler, and Matthias Enderle.  From some recordings I've heard I concluded she must have played a pretty good violin but I was not able to find out what it was.  Stucki died on June 9, 2011, at age 90.  

Akiko Suwanai

Akiko Suwanai is a Japanese violinist and teacher born (in Tokyo) on February 7, 1972.  Suwanai won the Tchaikovsky violin competition at age 18 (1990) and is well-known for playing one of Heifetz’ old violins, the Dolphin Stradivarius of 1714.  She initially studied in Tokyo with Toshiya Eto.  Eventually she moved to the U.S where she studied with Dorothy DeLay and Cho Liang Lin at Juilliard.  Then she moved to Berlin to study with Uwe Martin Haiberg at the Advanced School of Art (the University of Art.)  Suwanai has since solidly established her career, gaining praise from critics and audiences throughout the world.  She frequently tours with top orchestras, but mostly in Europe.  She soloed with the New York Philharmonic on November 20, 1997, playing the Mendelssohn concerto – the one in e minor.  Suwanai first performed with the Berlin Philharmonic on September 12, 2000, playing Ravel’s Tzigane.  She was 28 years old.  Charles Dutoit was on the podium.  She opened the Shanghai Spring International Music Festival in 2009, being the first Japanese violinist invited to do so.  She has recorded with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, among others.  Suwanai also teaches master classes occasionally.  As far as I know, Suwanai presently has her home base in Paris.  Paris, New York, Berlin, Rome, and London are probably the most popular cities for concert violinists to work from.  Here is a YouTube video of her playing (in the orchestra) with a few other musicians at the Louvre.  And another is here at the same concert, playing the double concerto by Bach.  Among her collaborators at the concert are Manrico Padovani, Sergey Khachatryan, Viviane Hagner, Hyun-su Shin, Manuela Janke, Steven Isserlis, and Arabella Steinbacher.  There are many other videos of Suwanai in concert on YouTube.  The photo is courtesy of Leslie Kee.  

Manrico Padovani

Manrico Padovani is a Swiss-Italian violinist born on August 12, 1973 (Perlman was 27 years old.)  He is the first Swiss violinist to perform all 24 of Paganini’s Caprices in concert in a single evening (Zürich, 2006.)  Born in Zürich to Italian parents, he began his violin studies as a child and later entered (in Winterthur, Switzerland) the class of Aida Stucki-Piraccini (who had also taught Anne-Sophie Mutter much earlier.)  (Winterthur is 15 miles northeast of the city of Zurich and is the city where in 1900, Albert Einstein first worked as a tutor before landing a job in the patent office in Bern)  At the Royal Conservatory in Amsterdam, Padovani studied with Hermann Krebbers.  Additionally, in Europe, he studied with Ruggiero Ricci, Boris Belkin, and Franco Gulli among other master violin teachers and composers.  He graduated from the Winterthurer Conservatory in 1991 and made his debut in Lucerne in 1992.  He has been concertizing in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. ever since and has even been called the “devil’s fiddler” for his brilliant technique and playing style.  Nobody has yet said that Padovani is in league with the devil, as Paganini was said to be, but it could yet happen – music critics can say and write what they wish.  His recordings include the concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Paganini, Prokofiev, and others in the standard repertoire.  His recording of the Beethoven concerto (with the Moscow Philharmonic) is especially remarkable in that Padovani uses Leopold Auer’s cadenza, not Kreisler’s (the Kreisler cadenza is the one most used by violinists.)  He is the only one to do so.  For the Paganini concerto, he uses the most difficult cadenza ever written for this concerto – the one by Emile Sauret.  His recent performances in Vienna and Prague are available on DVD as well (this is not surprising since Padovani is very photogenic) and a live CD recording of the second Paganini concerto (B minor) in Seoul is also already in the catalog.  He also recently recorded the soundtrack to the European film Sinestesia (2010) and the 24 Caprices of Paganini.  (Other concert violinists who have recorded soundtracks are Joshua Bell, Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, Toscha Seidel, and Louis Kaufman.)  In addition, he has made a very large number of radio and television appearances in Europe and Canada.  (Eddy Brown used to play almost exclusively on radio.)  There are also several videos of his concert appearances on YouTube, including the incredibly difficult Ernst arrangement of Schubert’s Der Erlkonig.  He frequently performs chamber music with other major artists and often appears in duo violin performances with Russian violinist Natasha Korsakova with whom he will also record several double concertos in 2011.  (Natasha Korsakova is profiled on this blog - December 15.)  Padovani played on a Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume violin (1861) for some time but presently plays the 1722 Jupiter (ex-Goding) Stradivarius.  (There is another Jupiter Strad from the year 1700.) 

Natasha Korsakova

Natasha Korsakova is a Russian violinist and writer born on January 24, 1978 (Itzhak Perlman was 32 years old and Jascha Heifetz was 77 years old.)  She is the only concert violinist that I know of who is fluent in five languages.  (The only other violinists who were fluent in that many languages were Henryk Szeryng and Otakar Sevcik.)  She is also the only one who has an exclusive concert dress designer (Laura Biagiotti) and the only one named artist-of-the-year in two different countries (Italy and Chile.)  It is noteworthy that while female concert violinists are moving towards more glamorous fashions, (witness Sophie Mutter, Sarah Chang, and Akiko Meyers), the males are becoming more ungraceful and casual, perhaps even grotesque (witness Joshua Bell, Leonidas Kavakos, and Nigel Kennedy.)  It has been said that Korsakova is very bold and charismatic.  Her violin studies began at age 5 and her first public performance took place at age 7 in Moscow.  However, her first teacher was not her father but her grandfather (Boris Korsakov), although she later studied with her violinist father (Andrej Korsakov, who studied with the legendary Leonid Kogan.)  She later studied in Germany with Ulf Klausenitzer and Saschko Gawriloff (at the Advanced Music School – Musikhochschule - in Cologne – 1995-1999.)  Nevertheless, her orchestral debut was back in 1985 with the Voronezh (Russia) Orchestra.  (This orchestra has been associated with several leading Russian conductors, including Evgeny Svetlanov, Kiril Kondrashin, Emin Khachaturian, Neemi Yarvi, and Alexander Dmitriev, and regularly plays in Moscow and St Petersburg.  It has also accompanied innumerable major artists: among them, Emil Gilels, Gidon Kremer, Vladimir Spivakov, Igor Oistrakh, Yuri Bashmet, Alexander Zhukov, Maxim Vengerov, and Mikhail Pletnev.)  She spent the first seventeen years of her life in Russia where her musical lineage goes back about six generations and includes composer Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), her great-grand uncle.  Korsakova has already toured (practically) the entire world and, of course, played in most of the world’s prestigious concert halls, with top conductors and major orchestras.  She has recorded several CDs which are available on the internet at ArizonaRecordings (and through ITunes and other electronic download venues) and there are several videos of her playing on YouTube.  She also delves seriously into chamber music and far flung music festivals, as do all concert violinists nowadays.  In the year 2004 she performed the Tchaikovsky concerto in Berlin for the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.  In 2008, she played a special concert in Vienna the night before the official opening of the European Football Championships.  She has also been invited to play for the Italian State President and his guests at the Palazzo Quirinale in Rome.  In 2010, she premiered and recorded (with the Czech Philharmonic) two concertos written for and dedicated to her – one by Robert Vinson (Concerto in F) and the second by Daniel Schnyder (Mozart in China.)  Korsakova has played a Vincenzo Panormo (also known as Vincenzo Trusiano) violin but is currently playing a Giovanni Pressenda (Turin, 1843) from the collection of Giovanni Accornero, Italian expert on luthiers, author, and instrument collector and dealer.  In 2011, she and Swiss violinist Manrico Padovani (the first Swiss violinist to have recorded the 24 Paganini Caprices) will record several double concertos by Alfred Schnittke, J.S. Bach, Arvo Part, and Antonio Vivaldi.