Word: amatis
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...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...
Glib, wild-haired Musicomedian Danny Kaye, working like a turkey gobbler, held up the auction's prize piece. It was not precious. It was a curio: Comic Jack Benny's violin, "Old Love In Bloom"-a $75 imitation Amati. Everyone present knew that only a war could have persuaded Benny to part with the old prop which had provided him with half his gags for the last 20 years. Before anyone could make a bid an attendant rushed up to Auctioneer Kaye with a letter. He opened it and gulped: "I have...
...early twenties Stradivari was still an apprentice in the workshop of Nicolo Amati, whose father and grandfather before him had made fine violins. For some 20 years after he left the workshop, Stradivari continued to imitate Amati's small, yellow-varnished models, then began to experiment with a style of his own. At the age of 56, when most men begin to take things easier, Stradivari painstakingly evolved an entirely new model, broader and darker in color than the Amati. All his life he had been a feverish but carefully slow worker; his later years showed no letdown. Though...