Master of Sound

On Sunday 26 July 2026 the Kirche Saanen — the small village church, cradled in the Saanenland mountains, where Yehudi Menuhin first lit his festival seventy summers ago — opens its doors for an evening unlike anything else on the calendar. It is called Master of Sound, and it closes a special summit weekend inside the 70th Menuhin Festival Gstaad. On stage: David Garrett and the members of his Guarneri del Gesù Club — and not only the instruments, but the great musicians who play them.

The club he built

The Club is Garrett’s own creation. After he bought a 1736 Guarneri del Gesù at auction — fulfilling, in his words, a lifelong dream — he began drawing together the small, scattered fellowship of people who own and play these violins. Once a year they meet to do something almost no one else on earth can: set their instruments side by side, pass them from hand to hand, and listen to how each one speaks.

What makes the gathering rare is the arithmetic. Barely a hundred and fifty Guarneri del Gesù violins survive — against the five or six hundred Stradivaris — each one a piece of history from the Cremona workshop of Giuseppe Guarneri, carved from the wood of a little ice age, finished in a varnish no one has ever fully explained. To bring several into a single room is, quite literally, to gather a fortune in sound.

Master of Sound

At Saanen the Club’s del Gesùs will be joined by Stradivaris, and the whole evening turns on one irresistible idea: hearing these two legendary makers compared directly — the same hands moving from one to the next — so the ear can catch what words can’t. The dark, vocal power of a Guarneri against the silver clarity of a Stradivari. As Garrett himself likes to put it, the Guarneri has something almost rugged and masculine; the Stradivari is sweeter, more feminine. For one night, both under the same nave. And here is what makes the evening almost unrepeatable: never before have these instruments been gathered and played together like this — all in one room, on a single night. A once-in-a-lifetime event in the truest sense, with no promise it will ever come again. Small wonder the tiny church sold out almost the moment tickets appeared, the interest far outrunning the handful of seats it holds.

Family matters

There is a quiet symmetry to the venue. The 70th festival is the first under its new artistic director, the violinist Daniel Hope — himself no stranger to these instruments — whose opening season is titled Family Matters, built on the founding idea that Yehudi Menuhin once brought friends from across the world to this quiet corner of Switzerland simply to make music together. Garrett’s Club is exactly that: a circle of friends gathered around a shared devotion. For one night, the Club comes to the mountains as part of Menuhin’s extended family. And for one evening, so are we.

And it gives back. Every ticket supports the Menuhin Festival String Academy, where the next generation of string players is trained — so an evening devoted to three-hundred-year-old instruments becomes, fittingly, an investment in the young hands that will carry them forward. The programme itself is still under wraps — part of the evening’s suspense — and we are counting the days to discover what these hands will choose to play.

Some of us from The Strings Society will be in those pews on the 26th of July — heart in the throat, the way you are when something rare is about to happen a few steps away. We’ll carry the night back to you here: the sound, of course, but also the held breath before the first note, and the hush that follows the last.

— The Strings Society Editorial Team