“No two Strads are alike, they say, but the violin that Mira Wang reintroduced to the world Monday night is truly special,” writes Geoff Edgers in Wednesday’s (3/15) Washington Post. “It was gone for decades, stolen after a concert in 1980, and its owner, Roman Totenberg, died in 2012 thinking it would never be seen again. At a few minutes after 8 p.m., Wang proved her beloved teacher wrong. ‘May he hear the violin tonight,’ she told an audience of 200 people at a private club in Manhattan, and then launched into the Ysaÿe Violin Sonata No. 2. Wang, 49, a masterful soloist who emigrated from China in the 1980s to study with Totenberg, performed a movement that seemed scripted for the instrument, the moment and the player, with shifting tempos, dashing runs and delicate, crying notes…. When Wang was done, she declared, ‘I’m holding the Totenberg Ames Stradivarius in my hands.’ … Among the 200 people at the concert were … Christopher McKeough, the FBI agent who helped recover the Strad in 2015 … Bruno Price, the rare-instrument dealer whose shop restored it [and] the three sisters … Nina, Jill and Amy Totenberg [who] last watched their father perform on the Stradivarius during the waning days of the Carter administration.”
Posted March 16, 2017
