Fiddler, bandleader, and singer-songwriter Laura Cortese (of Laura Cortese & the Dance Cards) wrote the music for the band’s new album Bitter Better in an entirely different world—pre-pandemic. However, its themes of “resilience and relief and release,” as she tells…
As told to Greg Cahill Keep Connected chronicles the ways in which string players and organizations are supporting and keeping in touch with their audiences or students throughout the global coronavirus pandemic. States are re-opening public spaces and shelter-in-place orders…
By Laurence Vittes | From the May-June 2020 issue of Strings magazine On June 8, Boris Andrianov, the Russian cellist who is behind the Vivacello and Vivarte festivals in Moscow, is scheduled to depart with illustrious colleagues on his 7th…
By Pat Moran With Jake Blount’s Spider Tales, shockwaves of brutality and subjugation echo like a field holler across the centuries, ranging from enslaved people working 19th-century plantations to the protests rocking America’s cities today. For his debut album, queer…
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By Emily Wright | From the May-June 2020 issue of Strings magazine The first written recollection of a cello with an endpin dates from the late 18th century. Prior to that, the instrument was supported any number of ways: between…
Here's a look how to play Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro in the style of Pugnani, a major work for any advancing student of the violin and a joy to play.
To say it was a disaster would be kind. But this is the one that sticks out for the simple reason that in one of my lowest moments as a student, I actually learned the most.
By Ryan Meehan | From the May-June 2020 issue of Strings magazine It will soon be ten years since my friends Jeffrey Myers, Jeremy Berry, Estelle Choi, and I formed the Calidore String Quartet. To celebrate our decade together and…
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Menuhin scaled the most exalted artistic heights, producing tones of unparalleled purity and nobility from his fiddle. Said Einstein upon hearing him, “Now I know there is a God in heaven."
As told to Greg Cahill Keep Connected chronicles the ways in which string players and organizations are supporting and keeping in touch with their audiences or students throughout the global coronavirus pandemic quarantine—even as other sectors of the economy reopen,…
By Scott Flavin | From the May-June 2020 issue of Strings magazine “Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.” —Robert Benchley I’ve served for almost two decades as concertmaster of one…
Violin maker Francis Kuttner wrote this recollection of his student days at the Scuola Internazionale di Cremona for the Fall 1987 issue of Strings magazine
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By Laurence Vittes | From the May-June 2020 issue of Strings magazine I first heard Canadian violinist Emmanuel Vukovich play at the Montréal Chamber Music Festival in 2014. It was after he had completed his undergraduate studies at Juilliard and…
By Laurel Thomsen | From the May-June 2020 issue of Strings magazine While it can be difficult for string players to find other violinists, violists, and cellists to collaborate with, walk into any crowd and chances are you’ll meet someone…
Here are six ways to hold a violin or viola to eliminate tension and improve your playing.
Antiquing has always been contentious, seen by its critics as a way of reinforcing the ill-founded belief that old violins are automatically better than new ones.
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“It was fun,” Lara St. John said with a laugh, in a recent Strings feature about her recording of the Franck and Beethoven ‘Kreutzer’ sonatas with pianist Matt Herskowitz. “Like, really fun. We were able to approach them asking, ‘Well,…
By Sasha Margolis Zara Nelsova was born to play the cello—almost literally. The woman who, in the 1950s, would be dubbed “Queen of the Cello” and come to be celebrated for her voluminous, molten-gold tone, started life as the missing…
By Whitney Phaneuf | From the May-June 2020 issue of Strings magazine Learning a stringed instrument as a child is daunting, but likely even more so when your parent plays professionally. So how do the pros’ kids learn? In honor…
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