It includes detailed chapters on the history and development of the violin family, old master Italian violin makers (including the Stradivari and Guarneri families) and an analysis of the bows of Francois Tourte.
In their second, 1966, recording of the Beethoven cycle, it is stated that Székely plays the 'Michelangelo' Stradivarius (1718), Kuttner plays the 'Santa Theresa' Petrus Guarnerius (1704), Koromzay plays a 1766 instrument by M. Decanet, and Magyar has a cello by Alessandro Gagliano of 1706.
His best instruments are meticulous copies of famous Stradivari and Guarneri designs.
Guarneri | Giuseppe Guarneri | Pietro Guarneri | Guarneri Quartet |
As a concert violist, he studied with Martha Strongin Katz, Heidi Castleman, and Karen Tuttle, participated in chamber music studies with members of the Budapest, Cleveland, and Guarneri quartets, and pursued advanced studies at the International Musician's Seminar in Prussia Cove, England, with Sándor Végh.
As a member of the Guarneri he collaborated with many of the world's most famous classical musicians, including Leonard Rose, the Budapest String Quartet, Pinchas Zukerman, and Arthur Rubinstein.
Formerly, she played the Guarneri del Gesu (Muntz), loaned in grandis agnitio from the Nippon Foundation.
Butler-Hopkins has studied chamber music with Gilbert Kalish, Gunther Schuller, and members of the Juilliard, Guarneri, Tokyo, and Budapest String Quartets, and received a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven with Lewis Lockwood at Harvard University.
He used a large number of diverse models but principally those of Stradivari Amatise and other models of Guarneri, Balestrieri, Guadagnini, Gagliano, Enrico and Giovanni Battista Ceruti or other violin makers from Veneto in the 18th century.
He is believed to be the first person since Paganini himself to give a recital on both the violins belonging to Paganini, one a Guarneri, the other a Vuillaume (in Saint Petersburg in 2003).
In 2010, Claudia Fritz, a researcher from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, and the violinmaker Joseph Curtin organized a double-blind study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which 21 professional violinists tried to identify which violins were old (including 2 Stradivarius and a Guarneri 'del Gesu'), which were new, and which they preferred.
Vieira plays chamber music, and has had coaching with Guarneri String Quartet, Mathias Tacke (Vermeer Quartet), Gerardo Ribeiro, Hans Jensen, Patricia McCarty.
In 1997 he played Paganini's famous "Il Cannone", a violin made by Italian luthier Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù in 1742, during a special concert in Maastricht in the Netherlands with the Limburg Symphony Orchestra and conductor Yoel Levi.
An active chamber musician, he has collaborated with members of the Guarneri, Juilliard, Cleveland, Orion, Mendelssohn, Ying and Miami Quartets, the Beaux Arts Trio, Pinchas Zuckerman, James Levine, Carol Wincenc, Paula Robison, Nancy Allen, Christoph Eschenbach, Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida, and Marc Neikrug.
::Slightly prefers the Guarneri and Fontenay to the Borodin Trio in these works: "Deciding between three such intelligent and well-planned performances is not simple, nor even wholly realistic. For all my admiration of the Borodin, I think there is an ease and elegance in the performance by the Guarneri that is closer to Mendelssohn. The Fontenay are very similar in spirit to the Guarneri, with whom choice can safely rest, if choice there must be."
One of the last built by Bartolemeo Guissepe Guarneri, this Guarneri del Jesu instrument gained its name after being owned by the Belgian 19th century violinist Henri Vieuxtemps.