L.A.’s stringed victory

Its origins are shrouded in mystery. It has been associated as much with the devil as with the sound of angels. Though it can convey whole worlds, it is as portable as a briefcase. It is arguably the most written about, obsessed over, fetishized instrument ever made by man.

It is, of course, the violin. And we are fascinated by it. By its high soprano voice, its otherworldly harmonics, its rich darker tones. To be sure, the violin is a beautiful object, its shape pleasingly curvaceous, its hue varying from honey to chocolate. But first and foremost, the sound is what grabs us.

“It’s almost like a trumpet sometimes on the E string, and the G string can sound like a somber voice,” says Frank Peter Zimmermann, a German violinist who will play the rarely heard Busoni Violin Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Dec. 20 and 21. “The violin has so many colors.”

Edward Yim, the Philharmonic’s director of artistic planning, echoes Zimmermann. “The closer an instrument is to the human voice,” he says, “the more emotional directness there is. And of all instruments, the violin sounds closest. Subconsciously that’s true, and so it clicks with people’s hearts and brains.”

Yim is among those responsible for the bumper crop of famous fiddlers that Los Angeles will hear this season. In part, that plenitude is an outgrowth of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, though the orchestra, which operates the hall, insists that it is also presenting plenty of fine pianists and other worthy instrumentalists. Yet the roster of violinists is a veritable Who’s Who.

Beyond Zimmermann’s appearance, Gidon Kremer will lead his Kremerata Musica in pieces by Alfred Schnittke and Dmitri Shostakovich in January. And Baroque violinist Giuliano Carmignola will arrive in February, as will Hilary Hahn. Maxim Vengerov will perform all three Brahms sonatas for violin and piano in March, the same month Sarah Chang and Christian Tetzlaff collaborate with the Philharmonic. Gil Shaham is coming in April and Joshua Bell in May, which is when Kremer will return to L.A. to play Bartok’s First Violin Concerto.

Of the world’s leading violinists, only Anne-Sophie Mutter and Midori won’t appear in L.A. this season. (Pinchas Zukerman performed with the Israel Philharmonic at Disney Hall on Wednesday night, and Itzhak Perlman will play Royce Hall in January.)

Nobody is likely to complain about a surfeit of virtuoso fiddlers, though. Audiences have long been unable to resist the visceral thrill that comes from watching them perform what Robert Lipsett calls “musical high-wire acts with no net.”

“Misplace a finger by no more than the width of a human hair and the instrument will suddenly be out of tune,” says Lipsett, who holds the Jascha Heifetz distinguished violin chair at the Colburn School of Performing Arts downtown.

Zimmermann prefers not to think about those pressures. “It’s like asking a centipede, ‘With which foot do you begin walking?’ ” he says. “The moment he thinks about it, he can’t walk anymore. And it’s like that with the violin: You can’t find words for it. It has to be some sort of magic.”

That magic can be enhanced by a performer’s very stance, says Naomi Sadler, editor of the Strad, the venerable English magazine devoted to string instruments. “If you compare the violin to any other solo instrument, there’s so much more going on,” she says. “The flamboyance of the bowing arm is very exciting to watch, and also the rapid movement of the fingers on the left hand. The fact that it looks hard is also part of the appeal. That adds to the drama of the performance. There are soloists who don’t move around very much, but they’re in the minority.”

No one knows exactly when the first violin was made, only that it was probably in Italy between 1550 and 1600. But the instrument’s development was rapid. Unlike almost all other modern instruments, whose present characteristics evolved in the 19th century, the violin achieved the form we know not long after its creation. Moreover, the finest examples of the instrument were produced a mere century or so later and remain, by common consent, unsurpassed to this day.

Lipsett says the violin’s singular history is part of its allure. “I think it makes for a remarkable contrast that we can look at something like airplanes, which in the 20th century went from the Wright brothers to the Concorde,” he says, “and then realize that for 350 years the violin hasn’t really changed.”

The violin’s mythic image was effectively secured by Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri in Cremona, Italy, between the late 17th and mid-18th centuries. Both men were the greatest talents in their respective family dynasties and produced not just violins but also lutes, guitars and other stringed instruments.

Stradivari, whose name is sometimes Latinized to Stradivarius, is virtually synonymous with violins of exquisite tone and great beauty, colloquially called Strads. He was prolific, working until he was 92. His well-known reddish varnish has long been thought to contribute to the magnificence of his instruments, about 650 of which survive.

Guarneri and his violins are best known by the moniker “Del Gesu” because his labels bore the letters I.H.S., which in both Greek and Latin assert the power of Christ. His instruments are renowned for their rich tones and their ability to absorb forceful playing, something that appealed to the great virtuoso Nicolo Paganini, who in the early 19th century started the vogue for Del Gesus. In the 20th century, such celebrated soloists as Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Henryk Szeryng and Arthur Grumiaux swore by these violins.

Eric Wen, co-chair of the musical studies department at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, has written extensively on the violin. “The general feeling is that the Strad is more refined,” he says, “but as such, you have to handle it with care. It has tremendous overtones, but you can crush the sound by playing it too firmly. The Del Gesus you can dig into. That’s why Heifetz played one. And the look of the instruments reflects these distinctions. The Strads are perfectly proportioned, but the Del Gesus, which are coarser, have their own beauty. The scrolls are very untidy, the F-holes imperfectly cut. There’s a rough-hewn beauty to them, like those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures.”

Sadler says such craftsmanship places the violin above other instruments. “A flute is just a flute,” she says. “Whereas with a violin, it’s made of wood, and that involves so many more choices. Wood is such a flexible material, and the makers have to have a lot of skill. I’m in real awe of anyone that can make a violin.”

Today, a fiddle by Guarneri or Stradivari can sell for $3 million or $4 million, according to Wen. Such prices fire the public imagination and help explain why someone would steal a Strad belonging to 91-year-old Erica Morini as she lay dying in her New York apartment in 1995.

“Violinists are obsessive about finding just the right instrument,” says Wen. “Maybe that’s why the violin is likened to the devil -- not just that it’s hard to play but that the instrument itself has a hold on people.”

Though not named outright, a Strad or Del Gesu was clearly the inspiration for the stringed star of “The Red Violin,” the 1998 movie that centered on the journey of a single outstanding fiddle across the centuries. John Corigliano’s score to that film won an Oscar, and the composer has extracted themes from it to produce a concerto that Joshua Bell will play when he appears with the Philharmonic in May.

It’s not quite right, though, to suggest that Strads and Del Gesus have come down to us as though right off the workbench. Superficial parts like strings have been replaced innumerable times. And even more substantial alterations, like the lengthening of necks and the thickening of interior sound posts, have been made to these instruments, mostly between 1780 and 1820. As the latest edition of the Oxford Companion to Music definitively puts it, “No great violin survives as it came from the hands of its maker; all have been changed.”

Beyond creating obscure objects of desire, Stradivari and Guarneri helped music develop. Their work crowned the era that made possible Europe’s great composer-violinists. From the 17th century through the 19th -- from Corelli, Vivaldi and Tartini through Paganini, Ernst, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski and Sarasate -- those who wrote for the violin also often played it.

But as the 19th century wore on, that tradition declined, so that by the 20th, a Heifetz was transcribing Gershwin songs rather than writing his own violin concertos. Lipsett, for one, regrets the passing of the legacy. “We don’t really have composer-violinists anymore,” he says. “And I don’t know why that happened.”

Violinists in the modern era are also less frequently said to belong to one of the so-called national schools -- Russian, Franco-Belgian, Austro-German -- that dominated the art of fiddling from the mid-19th century through much of the 20th.

Those schools gave violinists personalities, says Wen, who believes something central to the violin’s appeal has been lost with the trade-off of powerful traditions for peripatetic virtuosos offering only technical prowess.

“People are concentrating too much on the left hand, the pyrotechnics,” says Wen. “The right hand, the bow arm, used to be the soul of the violin. Fritz Kreisler’s bowing was amazing: articulate, incisive, inimitable. Jacques Thibaud’s vibrato was hardly there at all, but he spun the sound through the bow magically. Before World War II, vibrato was used with greater variety. The bow today is just plastered onto the strings. It doesn’t let up. It doesn’t breathe.”

Sadler blames these changes on modernity, at least indirectly. “If you looked at the technique of someone like David Oistrakh, it would be quite different from, say, [legendary French virtuoso Eugene] Ysaye,” she says. “But these days many violinists sound quite similar, and the ease of studying abroad has furthered this trend.”

And though Sadler acknowledges the archival value of recordings, she takes technology to task as well. “The advantage of the prevalence of recordings is that performance standards have improved,” she says. “But the disadvantage is that because you can listen to the best and imitate the best, you might not go down your own path. Young violinists often play it safe.”

The artists themselves would probably beg to differ. The best consider themselves links in a long chain, absorbing lessons from masters and in turn passing them on. It’s why they make so much not just of an instrument’s provenance (Strad, Del Gesu, etc.) but of its history. Bell, for instance, speaks proudly in interviews of playing a Strad that once belonged to the great Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman.

And listen to Zimmermann discuss his 1711 Stradivari, played for a time by Kreisler: “It’s not only a great Strad, but it also somehow has in it the soul of Kreisler. Sometimes it seems it almost plays itself.”

Violinists, in Zimmermann’s view, are the music world’s poets. “With the piano, there is something mathematical and mechanical,” he says. “Violinists are more emotional and intuitive.”

That, of course, is among the most compelling things about fiddlers -- their ability to dazzle beyond audiences’, and perhaps their own, comprehension. And with so very many of the world’s greatest violinists coming to L.A. this season, the opportunities for awe-inspiring evenings approach the overwhelming.

Yim of the Philharmonic says that violinists above all other performers bedazzle him. “It’s scary-remarkable,” he says. “The bowing, the fingering, the precision required -- it’s just jaw-dropping. I sit there gaping.”

Yet the connection between these players and their instruments transcends cause and effect. Violinists feel bound to their instruments. They regard them as appendages. “It’s like your second voice, your second soul,” Zimmermann says. “It’s part of your body.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Ready to take a bow

GIULIANO CARMIGNOLA

Along with Fabio Biondi and Andrew Manze, Carmignola is one of the fiddlers three who have made the baroque violin sexy in the new century. Casting off notions that period strings need to sound thin and dry, this Italian-born musician plays with a vibrancy that more “modern” players might envy. He is probably best known to American audiences through his collaborations with conductor Andrea Marcon and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. Their recordings of Bach and Vivaldi for Sony Classical have earned warm reviews, though they’ve just jumped labels to Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv line. Fittingly enough, Carmignola makes his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut on Feb. 8 in an all-Vivaldi program, with Venice Baroque and Marcon happily in tow. And, yes, the program includes “The Four Seasons.”

HILARY HAHN

The 24-year-old, Baltimore-born Hahn is that rare thing: a classical artist who’s achieved mainstream fame without crossover compromises. Like Joshua Bell (her senior by 13 years), Hahn is an American violinist of fearless instincts, eager to tackle everything from Bach to Barber and beyond -- not long ago, she commissioned a fiddle concerto from bassist Edgar Meyer. Her first CD, an audacious solo-Bach outing, wowed critics and record buyers alike. And subsequent albums have continued to thrill. “No one told her you can’t play it that fast” is perhaps the harshest criticism she’s yet received. And though rumors abound about her increasingly diva-like persona, Hahn, a regular at the Philharmonic, never fails to dazzle in performance. For the time being at least, she remains America’s sweetheart.

MAXIM VENGEROV

This Siberian violinist, not yet 30, is the closest thing we have to a Heifetz. A peerless technician whose cool perfection belies a fiery Slavic soul, Vengerov brings intense concentration and a big, plush sound to whatever he plays. Having recorded all the major violin concertos, as well as several not-so-major ones, Vengerov is branching out, playing works by modern composers and rigorous esoteric material such as the sonatas of Ysaye, something about as easy as swallowing coarsely ground glass. Ever in search of a challenge, the fiddler recently recorded Walton’s Viola Concerto -- so what if he had to teach himself to play that instrument from scratch? On March 3, in a guaranteed “event” recital, Vengerov plays all three Brahms sonatas with the quirky Turkish pianist Fazil Say.

CHRISTIAN TETZLAFF

Though they’re loath to be lumped together and certainly have individual virtues, Tetzlaff, Frank Peter Zimmermann and Thomas Zehetmair represent another troika, the modern Austro-German school. With the exception of the excellent Anne-Sophie Mutter, Teutonic fiddling was essentially in a funk between the mid-20th century and this new breed’s ascendancy a decade ago. Probing and precise, Tetzlaff places cerebral concerns above the bravura. His pristine, lean sound is ideal for such modern masters as Berg, Bartok, Schoenberg, Ligeti and even more recent scores. Indeed, he’ll be playing Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic in March. Tetzlaff has formed fruitful and lasting partnerships with such esteemed younger pianists as Leif Ove Andsnes and Lars Vogt.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The string section

The violinists that Walt Disney Concert Hall is featuring this season.

Where: Disney Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, $15-$120, (323) 850-2000

Frank Peter Zimmermann plays the Busoni Violin Concerto Dec. 20-21.

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Musica perform Schnittke and Shostakovich

Jan. 20.

Giuliano Carmignola and the Venice Baroque Orchestra play Vivaldi Feb. 8.

Hilary Hahn recital Feb. 10.

Maxim Vengerov and Fazil Say (piano) in recital March 3.

Sarah Chang plays the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 March 4-7.

Christian Tetzlaff plays the Bartok Violin Concerto No. 2 March 13-14.

Gil Shaham plays the Brahms Violin Concerto April 22-25.

Joshua Bell plays Corigliano’s “Red Violin” Concerto May 6-9.

Gidon Kremer plays the Bartok Violin Concerto No. 1 May 21-23.

A collection of great violin recordings

An easy way to experience the spell cast by virtuoso fiddling is, of course, as simple as listening to recordings. Here are a few recommendations from the experts. All the music listed has been issued on CD. Many have been reissued several times, and in various formats, and can be found in secondhand shops as well as at record stores.

Robert Lipsett

Jascha Heifetz Distinguished Violin Chair

* Nicolo Paganini: The 24 Caprices, played by Ruggiero Ricci (London/Decca) [1950]

* Nicolo Paganini: Violin Concerto No. 1, played by Yehudi Menuhin and the Paris Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pierre Monteux (EMI Classics) [1934]

* Camille Saint-Saens: “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” and Pablo de Sarasate: “Zigeunerweisen,” played by Jascha Heifetz and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, conducted by William Steinberg (RCA Victor) [1951]

Naomi Sadler

editor of the Strad

* Johannes Brahms: Violin Concerto, played by Itzhak Perlman and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini (EMI Classics) [1976]

* Jan Sibelius: Violin Concerto, played by Vadim Repin and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Emmanuel Krivine (Erato) [1995]

Eric Wen

Curtis Institute’s co-chair of musical studies

* Karl Goldmark: Violin Concerto No. 1, played by Nathan Milstein and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Harry Blech (Testament) [1957]

* Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Violin Concerto, played by Jascha Heifetz and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Alfred Wallenstein (RCA Victor) [1953]

* Fritz Kreisler: Assorted short pieces and transcriptions, played by Kreisler (EMI Classics) [1930s]

* Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto, played by David Oistrakh and the Staatskapelle Dresden, conducted by Franz Konwitschny (Deutsche Grammophon) [1954]

Edward Yim

L.A. Phil’s director of artistic planning

* Bela Bartok: Violin Concerto No. 1,

played by Isaac Stern and the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy and Bartok. Bela Bartok: Violin Concerto No. 2, played by Isaac Stern and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classical) [1961 and 1958]

* Various composers: Short pieces, played by Michael Rabin (Sony Classical) [1950-53]

Frank Peter Zimmermann

German violinist

* Johann Sebastian Bach: The Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, played by Nathan Milstein (Deutsche Grammophon) [1973]

* Edward Elgar: Violin Concerto, played by Yehudi Menuhin and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Elgar (EMI Classics) [1932]

* Nicolo Paganini: The 24 Caprices, played by Michael Rabin (EMI Classics) [1958]

David Mermelstein can be contacted at weekend@latimes.com.