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GRAMMY Magazine - November 20, 2002 Stradivari Society connects patrons, players and world-class violins GRAMMY.com Dave Helland Geoffrey Fushi is a renaissance man with a touch of P.T. Barnum. Adept in both scholarship and showmanship, equally at home in the worlds of art and business, he is also the man with the multi-million dollar violins who knows how to put on a good show. Recently he traveled to China with $15 million worth of violins: one for each movement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons that was performed by the leading Chinese concert violinist, Siqing Lu, who was presented with the one of the instruments. The televised concert was seen by hundreds of millions of people. A partner in the Chicago firm of Bein & Fushi, dealers in antique string instruments, he is also the founder and polestar of the Stradivari Society, which puts the finest violins — Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù violins made in Cremona, Italy in the late 17th and early century 18th centuries — under the chins of some of the most accomplished young musicians. Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham, Leila Josefowicz, Sarah Chang and Vadim Repin all started their careers playing violins the Society arranged for them to borrow. "Seeing that the best player gets the best instrument, that's something that is known and understood around the world about the Stradivari Society," explains Fushi. "If a person is associated with the society it means that they are someone of special merit." The Society began in 1985 when Dorothy DeLay of the Juilliard School approached Fushi about the loan of an instrument for her most promising student, Midori. Fushi was able to find a violin, persuade a patron to purchase it and then loan it to the teen-aged violin prodigy. The Society has grown to two dozen patrons who are each rewarded with an annual concert by the artist to whom they have loaned an instrument. The loan is typically for a period of three years, and often the artist then buys the instrument from the patron. The society administers the loans, arranges for insurance and the maintenance of the instruments, and acts as liaison between artist and patron. Violinist Vadim Gluzman, who plays on the Stradivari "ex-Leopold Auer" loaned to him by the society, compares playing the instrument to driving a Lamborghini after a lifetime of Fords. Gil Shaham was 19 years old when the society loaned him the "Countess Polignac," named after the collector who once owned it. "I fell in love with it instantly. It only took playing a couple notes on it to know that I wanted to continue playing it," recalls Shaham. "Each instrument has its own personality and character, but there's a certain glow some great violins have that you can't find anywhere else." The loans are only a small part of Fushi's life in music. Besides selling instruments, the firm also has an apprenticeship program to train craftsmen in the arts of repair and restoration, reprints books on violins, such as How Many Strads?, and publishes new works, including Miracle Makers, a coffee table book picturing the 30 Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù violins used to record an accompanying CD. "Over $100 million worth of violins," boasts Fushi, who is working on a history of Guarneri violins as well as an "audio fingerprinting" of the instruments. The outspoken Fushi, who has handled more Strads than anyone since Stradivari, has his own ideas about recording sound. "When you stand next to a concert violin in a room, many people object to what they hear because the sound is so sharp and incise and brilliant that it can hurt your ear. In a concert hall with 1,000 or 2,000 people and you're 50 to 100 feet away, that dissipates tremendously," explains Fushi. "Most recording people want ambience and to get away from the instrument so that is not real and life-like and in your face. The older recording artists like [Mischa] Ellman and [Jascha] Heifetz recorded with a close mic technique that really allowed you to hear all the color of the sound and the surface noise of the string. It was so much more lifelike. That's what I've worked at doing with this audio fingerprint." The 59-year-old Fushi began violin studies at age 7. He saw his heroes Yehudi Menuhin, Nathan Milstein, and Jascha Heifetz play, and after a rough day has been known to take one of the instruments out of the vault to play. "The things we have here are what, as a kid, would have been the impossible dream. One day about 20 years ago, Milstein, who was a hero of mine, was at the counter of our shop. He told me he was satisfied with his violin and bow so he wasn't going to be a customer, but he hoped we wouldn't mind if he visited when he was in town. For me it was like being a kid shooting baskets, and Michael Jordan said he wanted to stop by and shoot hoops once in a while." (Dave Helland is a regular contributor to GRAMMY.com.) |