The Great Chin-Rest Incident of Aught-Nine

Well, as Sarah alluded to yesterday, we had some added excitement at our Carnegie Hall concert Monday night, when our distinguished soloist had his chin rest come loose midway through the Sibelius concerto, and had to pull a fast swap with concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis. This is a big deal for any soloist, but fortunately for Leonidas, Jorja doesn't play just any violin. Her instrument was made in 1700 by the Italian master Matteo Gofriller, and one friend of mine in the audience said that he actually liked the dark, penetrating sound of Jorja's instrument even more than Kavakos's Stradivarius.

The New York Times reviewer noted that Jorja "tried to fix the violin during the concerto but could not." What he didn't mention is that the way she tried to fix it was by removing an earring and going all MacGyver on the chin rest mechanism. (Chin rests are attached to the instrument via a simple padded clamp, which is usually adjusted with a tool that looks like a piece of stiff paperclip.) When she couldn't get the thing tightened properly with the earring, she removed it entirely instead, and proceeded to play the rest of the concerto, sans chinrest, on Kavakos's instrument.

This actually further complicated matters when the concerto was over, because it was more or less guaranteed that the audience would want an encore from Kavakos. But his signature encore - an arrangement of Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra - uses a ricochet bowstroke so insanely difficult that it had our entire string section baffled when we first heard it last week. Could he pull it off on an unfamiliar violin? Would he even try?



Well, of course he could. And did. And the place went nuts. All in all, little disasters like this tend to turn quickly into good stories to tell other musicians over a beer later on. In fact, an hour or so after the concert, I found myself swapping similar stories with a couple of friends in a bar across the street from Carnegie. One friend remembered a soloist breaking a string mid-concerto, and turning to the concertmaster, only to find that his string had also just broken. Another friend recalled a snotty young concertmaster at Juilliard who once refused to give up his instrument to a soloist in need, a breach of orchestral protocol if ever there was one.

And then, there's the swap story to end all swap stories - it involves violin superstar Midori, and the incident in question pretty much made her famous...