Masters of Sound

When you realize that more than a quarter of a billion dollars and six thousand years of precious wood — of music written and played by some of the most famous hands that ever held a bow, of the history of music itself — are sitting right there in front of you…

when you realize you are about to hear that same history played for you, by some of the most astounding violinists alive…

when you realize that this is the very first time, and possibly the only time, those violins and those players will ever be in one room together…

Well. Let me tell you. You feel overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed by the expectation. By the beauty. By the sheer, impossible value of the moment. Overwhelmed by the realization that you are one of the very few people who get to live it — and by a strange sort of responsibility that comes with that: to listen, to be present, to take part in every second and every note of that night. Because you don't know if it will ever happen again. Or whether you'll be in the room if it does.

• • •

We talked about that kind of expectation — that kind of waiting that doesn't pass but expands, quietly, then everywhere, until the moment it was made for finally arrives, carrying everything we imagined into it, and disappears. Leaving something real. Something a little less infinite. And the quiet need to begin waiting again. (We talked about it here, and again the day of the concert, with my coat half on and the rain coming down.)

And this is where we are right now. The moment is gone. We're waiting again. But there's a sensation latent in the soul — I can't shake it and I don't want to — that this night, this beauty, this fulfilment will be difficult to experience again anytime soon.

So before it settles into memory and gets quieter, as even the loudest joys do, let me write it down exactly as it was.

• • •

I was right.

I wrote, that rainy Sunday, that David and those violins would hand us back the sun — from inside a church, in the dark. And that is precisely what happened, and it had nothing to do with the stage lights, and nothing to do with whatever brightness was still lingering outside when the doors opened.

It came from the people. From David first — but honestly, from everyone. Artists and guests alike were shining. You could see it moving through the pews like a current: excitement, disbelief, and that particular kind of passion that only gathers when everyone in a room knows they are exactly where they should be.

And what a room. You know it by now — the church at Saanen, wooden and warm, every wall painted floor to ceiling with medieval frescoes, saints looking down through six centuries of candle smoke, that date — 1604 — painted up near the rafters like a casual remark. Except this time the pews weren't empty. This time the church was full of the festival's own audience — people who come to Gstaad for the music, who know when to hold their breath, who applaud the way you thank someone. Put that building, that audience, and those violins and violinists in one place, and every soul in the room shakes and brims. Mine certainly did.

• • •

The evening opened with a beautiful introduction by the festival's new artistic director — David's friend, an astounding violinist in his own right, and the man whose del Gesù we once held for a few impossible seconds: Daniel Hope.

He thanked David "for coming here, for bringing these instruments, for bringing also an amazing collection of spectacular violinists with him." And then he said something I want you to read slowly, because it's the quiet heart of the whole gala:

David donated his fee that evening — and the proceeds of the concert go to the festival's String Academy. To the young musicians. The academy that Yehudi Menuhin's 1963 idea grew into, the one Daniel Hope now leads with his own hands. "This has been an extraordinary event to organise," Hope said, and then, simply: "It's something that's never happened before."

The director of the Menuhin Festival, telling a sold-out church that what they were about to hear had no precedent. He was not exaggerating. He was, if anything, being restrained.

• • •

Then David took the stage — and with him, the reason we were all there.

"We're going to move on to the main acts of tonight," he said, "which are the instruments." And he meant it: all evening long, the true protagonists were the violins, and the players — David included — spoke of themselves almost as their staff. "It's a little bit of a tradition that I get to play the first couple of songs," he smiled, and lifted the first legend of the night: the "Baltic" Guarneri del Gesù of 1734 — "recently sold at a New York auction for over ten million dollars," David noted, to a ripple of nervous laughter. "So we're off to a very nice start."

Kreisler's Tempo di Minuetto, played by David on the Baltic, in a frescoed church. That was merely the beginning.

He thanked the fellow violinists and collectors for coming "from Tokyo, from Los Angeles, from New York City, all across Europe" — because these violins and their guests really had crossed the world for one evening. He introduced the pianist of the night, the wonderful Julia Okruashvili, who would accompany every one of them for hours with the patience and grace of a saint. And he told us, with a grin, the secret of the whole thing:

"It is a spectacular night also for me. I have been doing this in private for the last four years. Daniel really did convince me to do this concert here for the first time in public, and… I don't think it is a really good idea. I think it's a bloody great idea."

Four years of the Guarneri del Gesù Club, lived in private living rooms — and that night, for the first time, the doors were open.

• • •

And then came the moment I will be telling people about for years.

Because there was one more tradition from those private living-room years that David refused to leave behind. "It was kind of important," he said, "to also include the person who I got this obsession with."

"So please welcome my dad, Georg Bongartz, to the stage."

His father. The man who put a violin into David's world in the first place — who, as David told us later, once saw an undiscovered instrument and "already had a gut feeling that this is something very, very special." (That instrument, by the way, was on stage too: the del Gesù they call the Monster, 1743. "The first time I laid eyes on it," David said, "I was like — it is something very, very special. And I'm very proud to be playing, for you and for my family over there, on this beautiful instrument.")

Georg Bongartz stood in front of an audience for the first time in a very, very long time — David reckoned it was probably the first time they had played together in public in many, many years. And before a note was played, the father gave his own introduction: a quiet roll-call of gratitude for the main teachers and the people who shaped David's musical journey. A father, thanking the hands his son passed through. In a season titled Family Matters. I told you that title wasn't soft.

Then the two of them played Shostakovich's Prelude for two violins — the Monster and the Baltic, side by side, father and son. If your soul didn't shake at that one, I'd check whether you still have it.

• • •

Then the great parade began — and here is the detail I love most about how the evening was built. Each violinist chose their own piece. But the violin each of them played? David assigned those. The curator of the night, matching player to instrument like a matchmaker who has known both families for years.

One after another they came: Andrea Cicalese, David Chernyavsky, Oscar Bohorquez, Cristian Fatu, Daichi Nakamura, Francisco Fullana, Anna Agafia, Linus Roth, Andrea Obiso, Liya Petrova — each stepping up to meet the violin David had chosen for them: the "Marchesa Guasco", the "Shkolnikowa", the "Fields", the "Pluvié", the "Sloan", the "Prince Doria", the "Mary Portman", the "Sphinx", the "Zimbalist", the "Cathedral", the "Desoer", the "San Rafael", the "Consolo"… Guarneri after Guarneri, with Stradivari and a noble Bergonzi standing among them. Kreisler and Gershwin, Tchaikovsky and Sarasate, Brahms and Debussy, the Love Theme from the movie Nuovo Cinema Paradiso dedicated from the stage — every player a different voice, every violin a different soul, and the church listening to all of them.

And in the middle of it, David kept telling the stories that make these objects human. That instruments in the room had been played by Pugnani, by Huberman, by Zimbalist, by Fritz Kreisler — and, yes, by Yehudi Menuhin: two violins which Menuhin played in his life were on that stage, in his own festival's church. There was the one that a legendary expert once dismissed as worth "about 17,000 quid" — and that today, as David put it with a collector's grin, is worth "beyond 14 or 15 million dollars."

• • •

And then — the whisper.

You remember the whisper. The one I wasn't allowed to give away. Two bows. One stage. Ask me tomorrow.

Near the end of the night, David called Daniel Hope back — this time not as director, but as violinist. Hope carried his "Lipinski" del Gesù of 1742 and told us its story: Lipinski, the only violinist who ever beat Paganini in one of his violin duels. ("When Paganini was asked who was the greatest violinist in the world, he said: I don't know. But the second greatest is Lipinski.") And David, who claimed he hadn't decided which violin to answer with, appeared with — of course — Menuhin's own Stradivari, the "Prince Khevenhüller" of 1733.

"So it's going to be Strad against del Gesù tonight," David said. "Sorry."

And then they played — Shostakovich's Waltz — and there was no "against" anywhere in it. Perfect synchrony. Perfect understanding. Two violinists sharing the music in perfect syntony, listening to each other the way old friends finish each other's sentences — a dance of the bows, David even leaning in to peek at Daniel's score, both of them grinning like boys. The director of Menuhin's festival on a del Gesù; David answering on Menuhin's Strad. The encounters between generations Hope built his whole first season around — no longer a line in a brochure. Happening. In front of us.

• • •

David closed the night himself, with two final pieces and two final violins.

First, Gluck's Melodie from Orfeo ed Euridice, on the "Fontaine" del Gesù of 1741 — brought to Gstaad by Peter Biddulph himself, a friend of David's "since I'm 12, 11 years old," and welcomed into the Club that very night. Even the violins, it seems, get adopted into this family.

And then the last one. For the final piece of the evening, David lifted the "Ebersolt–Menuhin" Guarneri del Gesù of 1741. Menuhin's violin. "We're going to finish the concert," he said simply, "with this beautiful fiddle."

And on Menuhin's own del Gesù, in Menuhin's own festival, in that seventy-year-old church, with the proceeds of the whole evening flowing to Menuhin's academy and the children not yet in the room — David played Schumann's Träumerei.

Dreaming. That's what the title means. I sat there, in the church where two mornings earlier we had rested a finger on a del Gesù still warm from Daniel Hope's hands, and I understood that I was watching the circle close in real time: the founder's violin, in the heir's festival, in the champion's hands, paying for the next generation's lessons.

• • •

And then, just when we all thought the evening had given everything it had, David didn't leave the stage. There was one more thing to do — because there was one more member of this family to celebrate.

Sitting in the audience was the great violin dealer Peter Biddulph — on his 80th birthday. "He's been such a big influence on so many young musicians," David told the church. "He helped, over the last 60 years, wonderful musicians to find great instruments. He's been a pioneer when it comes to Guarneri del Gesùs — but beyond that, when it comes to Cremonese, Viennese, Milanese instruments." The man whose 1994 Metropolitan Museum exhibition planted a dream in a 13-year-old David: "one day I'll try to bring also some Guarneris together." Look around, I thought. You did.

"Peter — where are you?" David called. "Happy 80th birthday. Julia, take it away."

And then it happened. The grand finale nobody could have printed in a programme: all of them — every violinist of the night, every Guarneri, every Stradivari, a quarter of a billion dollars of the most precious instruments on Earth, together on one small wooden stage — played Happy Birthday. For one man. The simplest song in the world, played on the rarest violins in the world, in a frescoed church, by a family.

If you ever need to explain to someone what the Guarneri del Gesù Club is, tell them exactly that.

The violin is not a trophy. I wrote that before the concert, and the concert proved it. It's a way of belonging to people you were never born to. And for one night, in Saanen — all of us in that room belonged.

I can't wait to see what they dream up next. And you already know I'll be waiting — badly, impatiently, the way we do — to tell you about it.