The exhibition ‘Sarasate, il violino dei virtuosi’ will mark the instrument’s 300th anniversary 

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The Museo del Violino (MdV) in Cremona has announced that it will display the 1724 ‘Sarasate’ Stradivari violin in a special exhibition from 6 September 2024 to 6 January 2025. The exhibition, in collaboration with the Musée de la Musique de la Philharmonie de Paris, will mark the 300th anniversary of the instrument’s construction.

Called ‘the yellow violin’ by Sarasate, it served as his principal performing instrument for most of his career, and was probably the violin he used on his celebrated recordings from 1904. It received its nickname in order to distinguish it from Sarasate’s other Stradivari, the 1713 ‘Boissier, Sarasate’, which was designated the ‘red violin’.

The exhibition is part of a collaboration between the MdV and the Musée de la Musique, which last year saw the 1715 ‘Cremonese’ violin hosted in an exhibition at the French museum, from September to November 2023.

The ‘Sarasate’ Stradivari is also said to have been owned by another great virtuoso, Nicolò Paganini, who purchased it directly from the famed instrument collector Count Cozio di Salabue. Following his death, the violin was sold to Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, from whom Sarasate bought the instrument in around 1864. Sarasate bequeathed the violin to the museum of the Conservatoire de Paris, whose collection it entered in 1909, the year after Sarasate’s death.

The exhibition is titled ‘Sarasate, il violino dei virtuosi’ and is curated by Jean-Philippe Échard, Riccardo Angeloni and Fausto Cacciatori.

Photos: Claude Germain © Musée de la Musique – Philharmonie de Paris

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