05/03/2026
The sound and the art
This week, the 34 musicians who have been granted the loan of precious string instruments from the Deutscher Musikinstrumentenfonds (German Musical Instruments Fund), managed by the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben in Hamburg, were announced. With over 270...
In the end, the musicians have won! Lufthansa and the Group’s affiliated airlines (SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, ITA Airways and Eurowings) will amend their rules for the transport of small musical instruments as of March 1: violin,...
What are the defining traits of a great orchestral leader? We find out on a sunny day, as golden rays illuminate the splendid halls of Palazzo Stauffer, with Andrea Obiso, Concertmaster of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and...
We are inside Palazzo Stauffer, home of the Fondazione Stauffer, in the heart of that Cremona which for centuries has breathed the art of violin making and great concert performance. We had the privilege of attending the lessons of Maestro Massimo Quarta as...
This morning, at the International School of Violin Making in Cremona, the official presentation of MIR – Musical Instrument Register took place. The new portal is dedicated to makers of handcrafted bowed and plucked instruments. Promoted by Eric Blot,...
Maestro Stefano Conia Senior, dean of the Cremonese luthiers, has turned eighty, a central figure in late twentieth-century violin making and a direct witness to an unrepeatable era of the Cremona school. Conia is a man from another time: charismatic,...
“When Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first premiered it was branded as unlistenable music, while Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was judged by the leading critic of the time as music that ‘smells of cheap spirits’; today they are...
There is a sentence that, read today, sounds like an alarm bell for the entire Italian cultural system: “Music risks becoming a job for the rich.” This is not a provocative slogan, but the bitter summary of what emerges from an investigation by...
The 2026 edition of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition will be a special edition entirely devoted to the cello and marked by a triple anniversary: the 150th anniversary of the birth of Queen Elisabeth of Belgium (1876–1965), the 150th...
It is customary, after the feast of Holy Christmas, whether one is a believer or not, to go “from church to church” to admire the Nativity scenes on display. Each year, those who set out to recreate the setting of the Grotto of Bethlehem introduce...
