guarneri

Interviewing the Guarneri quartet is about the most extreme example they could've found in this regard.

Rather it was a secret recipe of wood preservative used by the Cremonese makers Stradivari and Guarneri to impregnate the spruce.

Heh, I'm pretty sure I had this exact effect when I tried playing a $250k Pietro Guarneri violin.

For that matter, there are many old makers whose violins are considered at or near par with the Strad, e.g., Andrea Amati and Guarneri del Gesu.

I discovered Guarneri via Leonid Kagan recordings, which were hair raisingly beautiful.

The character of the Guarneri is as different from a Strad as, say, Ethel Merman is from Maria Callas, and the Guarneri is Merman -- a lot of odd-order harmonics give it a harshness, but damn, you can hear it from a mile away.

> Essentially, the quality of violins dropped precipitously after the deaths of Antonio Stradivari (1737) and Joseph Guarneri del Gesu (1745), and it’s (sic) has never recovered.

It was only as violin technique and string and bow technology improved, and older instruments were modified with stronger bass bars and back-tilted necks mortised into top blocks, that the Stradivari and Guarneri instruments became so highly-prized.

(I don't agree.) That being said, Stradivari and Guarneri were not so highly-rated in their own lifetimes; the Amati family and Jacob Stainer fit the ideal of tone and power of that time.

I know I prefer the sound of a Guarneri violin, but Strads are reputed to have better piercing power for carrying to the back of a concert hall, which was definitely an advantage in the days before electric amplification and computationally modeled and strategically baffled reverberant chambers for maximum audio enjoyment over the widest possible range of listeners.

But isn't it true that "the best violin players have almost unanimously said they prefer a Stradivari or a Guarneri"?

The abstract [1] says: "We asked 21 experienced violinists to compare violins by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu with high-quality new instruments.

The NYTimes article summarizes it this way: "For hundreds of years, the best violin players have almost unanimously said they prefer a Stradivari or a Guarneri instrument...

Researchers have shown musicians can't actually differentiate between newly built violins and Stradivarius: "The duo asked professional violinists to play new violins, and old ones by Stradivari and Guarneri.

Break a Strad or Guarneri, and you're done.

I think Vuillaume's violins then became patterns for other instrument makers to use, and we have this legacy now where most modern violins are patterned after a Strad or a Guarneri.

I've read accounts from several elite players who were told they wouldn't be taken as seriously if they played a contemporary instrument compared to if they played a Strad or Guarneri, independent of their playing ability.