Word: amatis
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Robbed: ex-Showgirl Patrice Amati Runyon Coffin, ex-wife of the late Damon Runyon, and her husband Richard Coffin, New Bedford printer; of some $200,000 (her estimate) worth of jewels...
...Salisbury, Md., an amateur in the audience gushed to Violist William Primrose: "Ah, you can't get away from the old Italian instrument makers!" In South America, critics rhapsodized over the tones of his "marvelous Amati...
Last week, with a grin, William Primrose pulled the rug out from under these connoisseurs of tone. During most of his concert appearances in the past nine months, his valuable Antonio Amati viola (circa 1630) had stayed in its plush-lined case. The viola his audience heard was American (circa 1945). He had played it for more than 40 concerts to prove a point: "There's more snobbery connected with old instruments than with anything I know...
Primrose's 1945 fiddle, five-eighths of an inch longer than his Amati, was built by the only U.S.-born member of the 300-year-old European Guild of Violinmakers, a stocky, shy Philadelphian named William Moennig Jr. Moennig also does all the repairing on Efrem Zimbalist's Stradivari violin, Gregor Piatigorsky's Montagnana cello.* Moennig, 40, and his 62-year-old father live and work in a colonial house on Philadelphia's once swank Locust Street, now lined with doctors' offices. The Moennigs sit at benches side by side, poking quietly into ailing...
...playing technique, then almost six months shaping and making the viola. Primrose told him: "I want quality with power so that the music will come out without an obvious wrestling match in front of the public." Moennig tried to blend the measurements of a Strad and an Amati, to get the Amati's mellow roundness with the greater brilliance of the Strad...