Andrew Sords

Andrew Sords is an American violinist and teacher born (in Newark, Delaware) on June 4, 1985.  As do violinists Hilary Hahn and Joshua Bell, Sords writes a blog to keep his wide audience informed about things related to his career; he also writes about his unique view of many other things as well.  I will say that his website is worth visiting for the blog alone although you will see so much more.  His repertoire includes two of my favorite and (unfortunately) seldom-played concertos – Bruch’s second concerto in d minor and the Schumann concerto.  In fact, I think the time will come when every concert violinist will take on both of these neglected concertos and perform them as regularly as the Brahms and Tchaikovsky.  Incidentally, the Schumann concerto was in danger of never surfacing thanks to a low opinion of it given to Clara Schumann (Robert Schumann’s widow) by none other than Joseph Joachim.  Sords has a very active solo concert and chamber music career which has taken him all over the globe.  He has given concerts with over 100 (different) orchestras, including the well-known major ones, and played the most important venues in every continent.  That may well be a record for any violinist but even those numbers, of course, will continue to increase.  Sords began to study violin privately at about age 6.  His first teacher was Liza Grossman.  However, his first instrumental studies were actually on piano, which he still plays.  He thus joins a number of concert violinists who have been quite proficient as pianists - Fritz Kreisler, Louis Persinger, Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Grumiaux, Andor Toth, Arabella Steinbacher, and Julia Fischer just to name a few.  Sords later studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Southern Methodist University.  His main teachers were Linda Cerone (pupil of Ivan Galamian), David Russell, and Chee-Yun (Kim Chee Yun – pupil of Dorothy DeLay.)  As do violinists Maxim Vengerov and Tai Murray, Sords enjoys and has a deep appreciation for dancing and has even participated in the famous “Dancing With The Stars” show for a charity benefit.  He was the first classical artist to do so.  That may seem unusual but French violinist Jean-Marie LeClair was actually a professional dancer, choreographer, and violinist in the early 1700s.  Sords is also unique in that he plays a modern violin constructed in 1912 by Belgian violin maker Augustine Talisse, a violin maker I had never heard of until now.  Albert Markov, Tai Murray, Christian Tetzlaff, Giora Schmidt, Judith Ingolfsson, Pip Clarke, Ilya Kaler, and Alina Pogostkina are among the growing number of concert violinists who are gravitating to modern instruments which, as you may know from reading this blog, I also favor.  Sords’ performances are typically characterized by music critics as being “utterly radiant.”  You can see his Facebook page here.  His most recent audio release is the New Age music CD with composer Sean Christopher.  

Henri Marteau

Henri Marteau was a French violinist, teacher, and composer, born (in Reims, France) on March 31, 1874.  He was a child prodigy and was similar to Felix Mendelssohn in that both of his parents came from wealthy families; however, Marteau’s parents were musicians as well – his mother was a pianist (and former pupil of Clara Schumann) and his father was a violinist and President of the Philharmonic Society of Rheims.  After hearing Camillo Sivori play a concert at the Marteau residence at age 5, Marteau began his violin studies with his father.  One usually reliable source states that Sivori himself presented the child with a violin.  Sivori would have been about 64 years old at the time.  Marteau later proceeded to study with a Swiss violinist named Bunzl (a pupil of Wilhelm Molique) and after three years went to study with Hubert Leonard at the Paris Conservatory.  He was 8 years old.  Leonard may have been Marteau’s uncle but I am not certain of that.  He made his debut at age 10 in Reims, playing for a very large audience – possibly more than 2000.  At age 13, on December 14, 1887, he played a Bruch concerto (probably the one in g minor) in Vienna, with Hans Richter on the podium.  Brahms was in the audience - it has been said that he was fascinated with the young violinist.  Grove’s Dictionary of Music says this took place when Marteau was 10 years old but that is probably quite incorrect.  In 1888, he made his debut in London, England.  He was 14 years old.  He then studied with Jules Garcin at the Paris Conservatory beginning in 1891.  In 1892, he was awarded first prize by the conservatory.  By then he was already an established touring artist.  In 1893, he toured the U.S. and again in 1898.  He also played in the U.S. in the years 1894, 1900, and 1906.  I don’t know if those appearances were part of a broader concert tour.  Marteau was a sensation each time.  It has been said that when he performed in Boston on his first U.S. tour, he played the Bruch g minor concerto with the Boston Symphony without rehearsal.  Arthur Nikisch was on the podium and Marteau had 12 curtain calls.  On March 3, 1893, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic playing the first Bruch concerto.  Anton Seidl was on the podium.  His last concert with this orchestra was on March 18, 1906.  He played Vieuxtemps' concerto number 5 on that occasion.  He was 31 years old.  On November 28, 1894, he premiered Theodore Dubois’ violin concerto in Paris.  That work has probably not been heard from since, except, perhaps, in France.  Marteau toured Russia in 1897 and 1899.  By age 26, he was professor of violin at the conservatory in Geneva, Switzerland.  Seven years later (1907), he was called upon to take over Joseph Joachim’s position at the Advanced School of Music (Hochschule fur Musik) in Berlin, where he remained until 1915.  There was some grumbling over this appointment because he was not German and it was rumored he had even been asked to renounce his French citizenship if appointed.  He supposedly refused and, being an international celebrity of the violin, was appointed anyway.  However, being French, he was placed under house arrest in Lichtenberg in 1916 because of hostilities between France and Germany in World War One (1914-1918.)  He eventually settled in Sweden and became a Swedish citizen in 1920.  Marteau eventually also taught at the music conservatories in Prague (1921), Leipzig, and Dresden.  Max Reger and Jules Massenet composed violin concertos for Marteau.  In fact, Marteau was a champion of Reger’s music and played dozens of concerts with him throughout Europe.  He premiered Reger's monumental violin concerto in Leipzig in October, 1908.  It has been reported that it was over a dispute over Reger’s music that Marteau’s first string quartet ensemble broke up.  The quartet probably had a name but I don’t know what it was.  He later re-assembled another quartet in Berlin.  Marteau was also a champion of Swedish composer Franz Berwald's music.  He played Berwald's violin concerto all over the place but the piece never entered the standard repertoire.  (The standard concerto repertoire consists of about twenty concertos and, sadly, that will probably never change.)  In April of 1894, Marteau played a piano quartet concert with Anton Hegner (cellist), Jan Koert (violist), and Aime Lauchame in New York.  It wasn’t the first time so it would appear that he played chamber music concerts on a regular basis though his ensembles are not reported (in any sources I found) to have been well-established or even well-known.  He played a Giovanni Paolo Maggini violin which had belonged to his teacher, Hubert Leonard, and had previously been in the possession of the Austrian Emperor.  He also owned and played a 1709 Stradivarius violin which now bears his name, a 1720 Guarnerius Del Gesu (one source says from 1731) which also bears his name, an 1827 J.B. Vuillaume, and a 1925 Gaetano Sgarabotto violin.  These last four violins together were valued, in Marteau’s day, at approximately $15,000, or $175,000 in today’s dollars.  They are now worth approximately $7,000,000.  In 1920, one could buy a Stradivarius for less than $5,000.  An average person in 1920 could buy one if he worked 25,000 hours or 12 years at minimum wage and saved every penny for just that purpose.  An average person today could buy one if he worked 400,000 hours or 192 years at minimum wage.  It has always been my opinion that those old violins are simply not worth the trouble.  Their values have been hyper-exaggerated by dealers.  Marteau’s tone was said to be large and brilliant and his style warm and charming.  One reference (E.N. Bilbie, 1921) claims that Marteau, prior to 1914, played six concerts at intervals of one every two weeks and that he played three concertos at each of them – 18 different concertos altogether.  Besides a substantial amount of chamber music, Marteau composed an opera, a cantata, two violin concertos, and a cello concerto.  Marteau died (in Lichtenberg, Germany) on October 3, 1934, at age 60.  In 2002, his home in Lichtenberg became the site for part of the tri-annual Henri Marteau violin competition which was established in that year.  

I told you so

The following is an abstract from an article which appeared earlier this month in some journal of the academy of science. The New York Times said something about it too.  It testifies to something I have been saying for years. New instruments are just as good, if not better, than old ones. Anyone spending a million dollars on an old violin is just wasting their money, unless they are buying it as an investment, the way one would buy an antique.  If you just want a violin to actually play on, buy a new one.  You will save a bundle.  By the way, the exact same thing applies to bows.  “Most violinists believe that instruments by Stradivari and Guarneri “del Gesu” are tonally superior to other violins - and to new violins in particular.  Many mechanical and acoustical factors have been proposed to account for this superiority; however, the fundamental premise of tonal superiority has not yet been properly investigated.  Player's judgments about a Stradivari's sound may be biased by the violin's extraordinary monetary value and historical importance, but no studies designed to preclude such biasing factors have yet been published.  We asked 21 experienced violinists to compare violins by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu with high-quality new instruments.  The resulting preferences were based on the violinists’ individual experiences of playing the instruments under double-blind conditions in a room with relatively dry acoustics.  We found that (i) the most-preferred violin was new; (ii) the least-preferred was by Stradivari; (iii) there was scant correlation between an instrument's age and monetary value and its perceived quality; and (iv) most players seemed unable to tell whether their most-preferred instrument was new or old.  These results present a striking challenge to conventional wisdom.  Differences in taste among individual players, along with differences in playing qualities among individual instruments, appear more important than any general differences between new and old violins.  Rather than searching for the secret of Stradivari, future research might best be focused on how violinists evaluate instruments, on which specific playing qualities are most important to them, and on how these qualities relate to measurable attributes of the instruments, whether old or new.”