A Whole World Out There

Here is a confession, and it is the reason this piece exists.

On the evening of Sunday 26 July we were in the Kirche Saanen for Masters of Sound — the charity night David Garrett hosted at the Menuhin Festival for his Guarneri del Gesù Club, with every franc going to the festival’s String Academy. We have already written about that evening twice. We wrote about the instruments, because the instruments were extraordinary: something close to six thousand years of Cremonese wood standing in one small mountain church, violins owned in their time by Kreisler and Zimbalist and Huberman and Menuhin, one of them the most expensive Guarneri ever sold at auction. We wrote about the room. We wrote about a man giving away the proceeds.

Then, a couple of weeks later, I went back to the printed programme looking for something else entirely, and I did something I should have done on the night.

I counted the names.

Ten. Ten violinists besides David walked out on their own, took a violin they had in most cases met that afternoon, and played two pieces on it. (Daniel Hope and David’s father, Georg Bongartz, played too — but in duet, beside him. These ten stood up alone.)

I knew the names. Most of them, at least — you don’t spend years around this music without them going past you, and Cristian Fatu I know properly, because we have sat down with him and published it.

But knowing a name and being able to say something true about a person are two different things, and I was living in the gap between them. I could have recognised seven of those ten on a poster. I could not have told you where any of them came from, what they do the rest of the year, or why they in particular were standing in that church.

So I spent the last fortnight finding out. It went through Japanese record-label pages and Italian newspaper interviews and Bulgarian radio and a Danish academy’s staff announcement and a Tarisio provenance file at two in the morning, and what I found is the reason you are reading this instead of something else this week.

There is an entire world out there. I am hooked.

• • •

They came from ten places, and the list alone tells you something about what a room like that actually is.

Andrea Cicalese was born in Naples in 2005 and has been in Munich since he was seven. David Chernyavsky is from Saint Petersburg. Oscar Bohórquez was born in Karlsruhe in 1979 — he is German, and the Peruvian and Uruguayan part is his parents, which is a distinction worth making because almost everyone gets it the wrong way round. Cristian Fatu left Bucharest and ended up in Los Angeles. Daichi Nakamura is from Kitakyushu, in the far south-west of Japan, and lives in Vienna. Francisco Fullana is from Palma de Mallorca. Anna Agafia — she performs under two given names and no surname — is Danish, from Copenhagen. Linus Roth is from Ravensburg, in the German south. Andrea Obiso is Sicilian, from Palermo. And Liya Petrova is Bulgarian, out of the music school in Sofia.

Naples, Saint Petersburg, Karlsruhe, Bucharest, Kitakyushu, Palma, Copenhagen, Ravensburg, Palermo, Sofia. Then one church in a Swiss village of three thousand people, on a Sunday in July.

• • •

This is the part that undid my assumptions fastest, because I had walked in with a lazy picture in my head — ten soloists, ten of the same job — and it is not remotely the case.

Obiso is a concertmaster. Since 2020 he has led the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, sharing the chair with Carlo Maria Parazzoli. He won it at twenty-six, first out of eighty applicants, auditioning in front of Antonio Pappano. He had taken his conservatory diploma with honours at fourteen and been admitted to the Chigiana at eleven, among the youngest they have ever taken — and he will still not accept the word prodigy. “Non credo negli enfant prodige: sono stato precoce, sì.” I don’t believe in child prodigies. Precocious, yes, that I was.

Chernyavsky has played in the San Francisco Symphony since 2009, in the second violins — a sentence worth sitting with, because it means that the man who walked out and played Kreisler on a Guarneri that night goes back to work in a section, which is one of the hardest and least applauded jobs in music. He was in the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kennedy Center pit before that. He also plays klezmer, professionally and without apology, and has a solo album called simply Klezmer Violin.

Fatu does three jobs. He teaches, on the faculty of two schools in Orange County. He performs, with the Pacific Symphony and the LA Ballet and in chamber music. And he records — a good part of his working life is spent in the Los Angeles studios laying down film and television scores that millions of people have heard without ever wondering whose arm it was.

Roth is a professor at Augsburg and runs the Leopold Mozart competition there. Agafia joined the violin faculty of the Royal Danish Academy of Music last year. Fullana now directs a festival in San Antonio and advises an orchestra there, on top of playing. Petrova teaches at the Paris Conservatoire, and next season she is artist-in-residence with the Royal Philharmonic at Cadogan Hall — three concerts across the year, Sibelius in October, then Beethoven, then Stravinsky. She made her Proms debut last August with The Lark Ascending.

Between the ten of them: a section player, a concertmaster, a studio musician, four or five teachers, two festival directors, a competition winner from almost every country that runs one. They are not ten of the same thing. They are most of the ways there are to have a life in this music.

• • •

Here is the second thing I had wrong, and it is the one that matters most.

I had assumed the evening worked like a loan scheme — that ten players had been handed treasures for a night. It isn’t that. The Guarneri del Gesù Club exists for people who own or actively play a del Gesù. Most of the ten did not arrive empty-handed. They arrived from lives already spent with instruments like these.

Fullana plays the 1735 del Gesù known as the “Mary Portman,” which belonged to Fritz Kreisler and has been lent to him since November 2016 by Karen and Clement Arrison through the Stradivari Society in Chicago. “It is a huge honour,” he said when he got it, “to be granted the use of one of the string world’s true crown jewels — an instrument once owned and played by my idol Fritz Kreisler.” He has since called it the first instrument on which he truly feels like himself. He played it that night, in the second half of his slot — which means that among all those borrowed violins, one man was simply playing his own.

Agafia plays the “Sphinx,” a del Gesù of around 1732, on loan from a donor who has never been named. Before it she had a big 1763 Gagliano she called “the beast,” because it was large for her and pushed back. Petrova has the 1733 “Consolo,” and the story of how is the best instrument story of the night: her own country bought a Guarneri and gave it to her to play. Follow the line backwards through six owners and a century and a half and you pass Bronisław Huberman, who had it from 1909; and among the handful of players the archives record on it, alongside Petrova, is Stoika Milanova, the towering figure of Bulgarian violin playing. Roth has had the 1703 “Dancla” Stradivari since 1997, bought for him by a Baden-Württemberg state bank. He says he knew in a second: “Das ist die Richtige für mich.” That’s the right one for me. Bohórquez plays a 1729 del Gesù with an 1845 Peccatte bow, and is the one of the ten publicly on the record as a club member. Obiso plays a 1741 del Gesù on loan from a Japanese foundation. Nakamura plays a 1738.

So the job was not “ordinary player, extraordinary violin.” It was people who live with great instruments being handed different great instruments — which, if anything, is harder, because they know exactly how much there is to know.

And a violin is not a piano. You cannot sit down at a good one and simply play it. Every instrument has its own string length, its own response under the bow, its own point where it gives and its own point where it bites, and finding those edges is the work of years. On that stage you had about eight bars. Then a three-minute miniature — a Kreisler, a Heifetz arrangement, the kind of thing that used to end a recital — with no orchestra to sit inside, no long build, no second chance.

Ten of them did that in a row, and not one of them was caught out.

The exception, and I love him for it, is Cristian Fatu — who, alone among the ten as far as I can establish, does not play an old Italian violin at all. He plays two modern American instruments, a Zygmuntowicz from 2018 and a Jordan Hess from 2019, and he sits in the Violin Society of America’s acoustics workshop at Oberlin, which is to say he spends his time on the question of how to build the next great violin rather than how to inherit one.

The man who plays new violins for a living was handed a 1742 and a 1729, and used the second of them to play a piece from a film about a cinema.

• • •

This is the thread I did not expect, and it is the one that turns a concert into an argument. Almost every person on that stage was there because somebody handed them something.

Some of it is family. Obiso’s parents are both professional musicians, and his origin story is the one I would put on a wall: he was small, it was the beginning of December, and he was pestering them about the Christmas tree. His parents sat down to rehearse a Respighi sonata as a duo. He forgot about the tree. Bohórquez’s father — also called Oscar Bohórquez — is a Peruvian bassoonist who left Lima for Germany and made his career in the orchestra pit at Karlsruhe; his mother was a Uruguayan pianist; his brother is the cellist Claudio Bohórquez. The German Wikipedia has to run two separate articles simply to tell the two Oscars apart. Agafia grew up in a house where her father is a classical saxophonist and her mother conducts choirs and plays the church organ, with three brothers all playing something. On how she ended up the one with the violin, she has said only: “I didn’t decide.”

Some of it is teachers, and this is where the evening quietly becomes a Menuhin Festival concert rather than just a concert that happened at one.

Nakamura’s teacher in Vienna was Michael Frischenschlager, who used to stop him within a few bars of Bach and tell him his articulation was wrong. His own account of the problem is the best single line I found in two weeks of reading:

He explains it exactly: Japanese stresses the ends of words, European languages the beginnings; Japanese tone runs flat, European speech makes peaks. He had to learn to phrase in a different language. And Frischenschlager, the man who made him do it, had himself studied with Yehudi Menuhin — so when Nakamura stood up in that church he was playing at Menuhin’s festival, in Menuhin’s village, two generations down Menuhin’s own teaching line, by way of Vienna and Kitakyushu. I do not think anybody in the room knew it.

Fullana studied with Midori, whom he calls his musical mother. He left Mallorca for America at sixteen and — having met a stranger called Susan Beckerman by chance, sitting next to her in Aspen — lived in her house in New York for a year. “By chance, I met this wonderful lady in Aspen,” is how he tells it. “We were just sitting near each other and talking.”

Agafia joined the faculty at the Royal Danish Academy in 2025 by taking over the class of Alexandre Zapolski, who had taught her since childhood and who had died that March. Her words on it, which I would rather quote than summarise:

And then there is the one I cannot let go of.

Chernyavsky studied at Indiana with Nelli Shkolnikova — the great Soviet violinist who won the Thibaud in Paris in 1953 and was given a Guarneri del Gesù on the strength of it. After her death that violin was examined by the expert Peter Biddulph, who concluded it was very possibly the last violin del Gesù ever made. Del Gesù died in 1744.

The violin Chernyavsky was given at Saanen is dated 1743–44, and it is called the “Shkolnikowa.”

I cannot prove from any published source that these are the same instrument, and I am not going to pretend otherwise — no archive I can reach carries an entry under that name. But the date lines up, and the name lines up, and Chernyavsky has spent recent years co-founding an academy in France named for that teacher, held in a château, where her own del Gesù was played this very month, from 3 to 13 August, alongside a copy two luthiers built of it in ten days.

Peter Biddulph, the man who authenticated her violin, was sitting in the church at Saanen that night. Ten metres away. We did not think to ask him.

If it is the same violin, then what happened on 26 July is that a man walked onto a stage and, for three minutes, played his teacher’s voice back into a room, and said nothing about it to anybody.

Somebody should ask him. We intend to.

• • •

Ten players, twenty short pieces, and the choices turn out to be a set of self-portraits.

Bohórquez — whose own cause is the music of the Americas, and who has spent years dragging South American repertoire into European halls, including a Brazilian composer, Flausino Vale, that almost nobody programmes — played Gershwin. Summertime, on a violin made in Cremona in 1730. It is not a marketing angle; it is his mother and father’s half of the world, played in the country he was born in.

Nakamura, who in 2017 became the first Japanese musician ever to win the Brahms competition at Pörtschach and whose debut record is the three Brahms sonatas, played Brahms — and the violin he was handed for it was the Bergonzi that belonged to Johanna Martzy. If the name means nothing, it should: Hungarian, born in Timișoara, won Geneva in 1947, made a handful of records collectors still fight over, and was lent this violin in 1949 by a Swiss amateur named Daniel Tschudi who had heard her play in a small town and simply offered it. She kept it for the rest of her life. Glenn Gould called her the most underrated of the great violinists of the age. A Brahms specialist, playing Brahms, on Martzy’s violin, in a Swiss village. Nobody in the church could have known.

Fatu used his time to talk about somebody else. Before the Nocturne he dedicated it to the memory of Dr William Sloan, the Los Angeles collector who had owned the 1742 in his hands, who had died the previous year, and whose family had flown in to be there. “Defining moments,” he said. “Meeting Dr Sloan, having the opportunity to play on this wonderful violin, has been a defining moment for me.” Then he took up the second violin and told the church it had belonged to Charles de Bériot — whose concerto, he pointed out, every last one of them had sawn their way through at nine years old. “We made a huge career at that age with that concerto.” Then he played Morricone on it, for his girlfriend.

Agafia played the Clara Schumann Romance. Of the twenty-seven items on that programme, it is the only piece written by a woman, and she is the one who played it.

Roth played Brahms and Albéniz, but the reason to know his name is a dead composer. He has spent fifteen years fighting for Mieczysław Weinberg — Polish-Jewish, escaped to the Soviet Union in 1939, lost his entire family in the Holocaust, wrote a vast body of music that then simply disappeared. Roth heard him by accident at a chamber festival in 2011, unprepared, and was, in his own word, shocked. He went on to make the first complete recording of Weinberg’s works for violin and piano and founded an international Weinberg society in 2015.

And:

Cicalese, twenty years old and the youngest person in the building by a distance, was handed two del Gesùs in one evening — the 1731 “Marchesa Guasco” and the 1739 “Maggio” — and played Tchaikovsky and Ponce on them as though it were an ordinary Sunday. It was, in fact, a Sunday. His second piece was the Estrellita: the thing Heifetz used to close with, the last sound before the lights came up.

And Petrova closed the guest half with the two violins carrying the most history in the room. First her own “Consolo.” Then the Prince Khevenhüller — the Stradivari that Henry Goldman bought for a twelve-year-old Yehudi Menuhin after hearing him play at Carnegie Hall, the violin Menuhin had said he dreamed of playing on, and then kept for the rest of his life. On it, at Menuhin’s festival, in the village Menuhin chose, she played the Méditation from Thaïs.

Of everything in that church, that is the moment I would take back if I could.

She said that about home. But I suspect it is close to what all ten of them were doing that night, on a stage that belonged to somebody else.

• • •

I went to Saanen for one violinist. I have written about him for years and I do not regret a word of it, and this page will go on covering him, because he is worth covering.

But the count is the count. Ten other people stood up in that church, and I had been sitting there looking at the wood.

One of them plays in a second violin section and moonlights in klezmer. One makes his living on chamber music and film scores and plays instruments built in this decade. One fights for a composer the twentieth century tried to erase. One had to learn not to phrase in Japanese. One inherited her teacher’s students. One, quite possibly, was handed his teacher’s violin and told nobody.

Each of them arrived in that church with an entire working life behind them, and left again the same night, and the only reason I know any of it now is that I sat down two weeks later and started reading.

There is a whole world out there. I am hooked, and from here on you are coming with me.

We have already begun writing to some of them. If they say yes, you will meet them properly, in their own words, at length, the way we like to do it. And if you were on that stage and you are reading this — we would very much like to hear from you. Especially you, Mr Chernyavsky. There is a question about a violin we would like to ask.

And before anybody asks: yes, of course I have favourites. Ten violinists, twenty pieces — I would be lying if I said otherwise. No, I am not putting them in writing. It wouldn’t be fair, and besides, I would quite like these people to answer my emails.

Ask me in private. The photograph is a still from our own video of the evening.

• • •

The ten guest violinists, in the order they played, with the instruments as printed in the programme.

The concert described is Masters of Sound, a charity concert hosted by David Garrett and the Guarneri del Gesù Club at the Kirche Saanen on Sunday 26 July 2026, part of the 70th Menuhin Festival Gstaad, with Julia Okruashvili at the piano; the proceeds went to the Menuhin Festival String Academy. Instruments and repertoire are as printed in the evening’s programme. Everything else comes from the artists’ own websites, interviews and official biographies, and from the Tarisio Cozio provenance archive — with our thanks, and with our apologies to ten people we should have introduced to you a fortnight ago.

— S.