Last night I had the fortune of attending a Bach Society performance (they’re a chamber orchestra at Harvard that b is in) featuring world famous violinist Ryu Goto. He was playing a 1715 Stradivarius violin.

For as long as I’ve been involved in music I have heard the praises of this particular violin maker sung loudly. I saw one in person in 2008 when I visited the Stradivarius museum in Italy, but it was behind glass, so I never heard one live until yesterday.

Much to my surprise, I didn’t like the tone at all. To me it sounded thin, scratchy, and very quiet. It seemed to cost the performer a lot of effort to get anything approaching a full, rich tone out of the instrument. I’ve heard plenty of violins costing only as much as a reasonably priced car (as opposed to the unimaginable millions the Strad would fetch if they ever actually sold one) produce a full, rich tone free of shrillness with comparatively little effort from the performer. I imagine a string section composed entirely of Strads would sound unbearable, so I was glad that the performer was underscored by an orchestra of “lesser”, more “modern” instruments. It is also entirely possible that the Strad was not constructed with modern tuning systems in mind (which have evolved since its construction), so adjusting/modifying it to thrive in them may have been difficult.

In any case, go ahead, burn me at the stake.