Word: violiniste
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Little Men Who Weren't There. None of the Budapest Quartet comes from Budapest. Only one of the four (first violinist Josef Roismann) has ever even visited the city. All are Russians. To the Quartet, this fact has become a continual embarrassment. Wherever they go, they are likely to be welcomed in fluent Magyar by effusive groups of Hungarians. The Quartet knows plenty of Hungarian music, but no Magyar...
...original Budapest Quartet, which toured Europe and the U.S. in the 1920s, was as 100% Hungarian as goulash. By 1927 its second fiddler left and a Russian took his place. By 1932 there was not a Hungarian left. Today the four are 43-year-old first violinist Josef Roismann from Odessa; 35-year-old second violinist Alexander Schneider from Vilna; 43-year-old violist Boris Kroyt from Odessa; 39-year-old cellist Mischa Schneider, brother of Alexander...
This is painfully true when Ray Nance, an ordinary trumpet player, a poor violinist, and an unnecessarily heavy-handed showman, is out in front as soloist. It is definitely not required that a violinist assume an agonized, orgiastic expression in order to produce a simple passage; Nance was such a phony mugger that when he trotted out for his last violin solo the crowd laughed before he even began to play. Nance would never have been tolerated in the old Ellington band, and there would have been no room for such ordinary musicians as Skippy Williams and Jimmy Hamilton...
Paper Doll was written 28 years ago, after an unhappy love affair, by an improvident Broadway dance-hall violinist named Johnny Black. The song did not even find a publisher. Black shelved it and went to work on another, the durable Dardanella, which became the rage of 1919 and has been under continuous revival ever since. But, according to Tin Pan Alley's best-informed chroniclers, luckless Johnny Black sold Dardanella outright for $25, and, when he got around to suing Publisher Fred Fisher, who made a million out of it, netted only...
Next to the late great Nicolò Paganini, the most famous violinist of the 19th Century was a fantastic Norwegian named Ole Bull. Ole (rhymes with Café au lait) took scarcely a violin lesson in his life. His brilliant playing was always eccentric in technique and in emotion it was usually the most sumptuous ham. But big, courtly, iron-muscled Ole was the most assertive personality in Norway and one of the most assertive personalities outside it. Last fortnight the first full-length biography of Ole Bull was published by his granddaughter's husband, Mortimer Smith of Sandy...