Janine Wildhage & Christophe Landon Rare Violins Exhibition

Janine Wildhage and Christophe Landon have a violin workshop in Berlin Mitte where they make violins and sell old Italian instruments. At last night's "Einweihungsfeier und Ausstellung," they threw a party to inaugurate their new exhibition of beautiful violins, old and new. Armenian virtuoso Mikhail Simonyan showed off his Landon Guarneri copy with a performance of "Armenian Prayer" and Ysaye No. 3. It had a gorgeous sound and a vast range of colors, which Simonyan brought out with a bow so spongy it could have been a bass bow. Having played another of Landon's Guarneri copies the day after he finished it back in New York, I could hear that Simonyan's years-long relationship with his had deepened and ripened its sound. His playing was confident and polished with lots of nice interpretive details and an unusual degree of bow control at the point.

After a few glasses of wine some of the people gathered started to pick violins up off the tables and play a few bars of Bach or Tchaikovsky. There were members of the Berlin Philharmonic there -- earlier in the day they had rehearsed with Nikolaj Znaider, who had, coincidentally, also visited Landon at the workshop that same day. Znaider is due to play Sibelius with the Berlin Philharmonic later this week (review to follow).