The Morini Strad

I just heard about a production of Willy Holzman'splay The Morini Strad that will be opening in Portland, Maine on September 27 and will run until October 23. The role of Erica Morini will be played by Laura Esterman.

The play is about the relationship between Morini and violin maker Brian Skarstad, and the mysterious disappearance of her instrument, a 1727 Stradivarius, from a closet in her apartment, while she was in the hospital.

You can read more musical assumptions about Morini here.

Erica Morini

I have been spending far too much time obsessing about and listening to recordings of Erica Morini (1904-1995), a Viennese violin virtuoso who would have had a career like that of Jascha Heifetz or Nathan Milstein, (both acknowledged her greatness and considered her a peer) if only she hadn't been a woman. She found it terribly frustrating not to be taken seriously by people in the managerial side of the music business. She did manage to have a career, but it was not the kind of career that a person of her tremendous ability and musicianship should have been able to enjoy. After she stopped playing she lived in semi-seclusion in New York. She died shortly after her instrument, the Davidoff Stradivarius, along with her scores, photos, and letters, had been stolen from her apartment. The instrument has yet to be recovered.

You can listen to her play the first movement of the Beethoven 7th Violin Sonata on this page, and read more about Morini here. The performance, of course, is not from 1928 (there's a mistake on the page), but there is a performance of a Brahms Hungarian dance on the same CD from 1927.

Violinists' Speaking Voices

This WQXR radio interview from February 2, 1955 was part of a celebration of Fritz Kreisler's 80th birthday. Before the Kreisler interview begins there are audio birthday greetings from Mischa Elman, Yehudi Menuhin, Nathan Milstein, Erica Morini, Joseph Szigeti, Ruggiero Ricci, and Isaac Stern. What an ear-opening experience it is to hear the speaking voices of these violinists, particularly after being so familiar with their violinist voices. I had no idea that Isaac Stern's voice could be so rich and mellow, and I noticed that Menuhin's voice sounds significantly more American than it sounded when he became older. Don't you just love the way Kreisler pronounces "works" as "woiks," and "first" as "foist?"