Did you know:
The violin was officially designed by Andrea Amati, an Italian lute maker. Amati was asked to build the violin as a lighter alternative to the lyre. Then along came Antonio Stradivari! He is responsible for creating possibly the best violin in the world, aptly named the Stradivarius. Since all this was happening in the mid 1500s there are no photos of Mr. Stradivari. Regardless, his work on his creation has lasted over 500 years! Many classical musicians prefer to play these violins still!
Here's Antonio hard at work! Moving forward to today though, modern violins are still being made all the time. The average violin is made of either spruce or maple and consists of about 70 pieces of wood! The Richmond Symphony uses several violins in all of our concerts including 96 violins at last season's "Come and Play" concert. That means at one time we had 384 strings being plucked and bowed! And that's just the violins. That's a lot of strings!!
We've had some pretty amazing violinists come through and perform with us too. For example, last season we were honored to have Gil Shaham perform with the orchestra. Mr. Shaham performs all over the world and we were so glad to have him as a part of our season. Check out this clip to see the master at work.
The season starts in 16 days. Come check out our violin section and see what 500 years worth of work has lead to right here in Richmond, VA
homepage sweet homepage: http://www.richmondsymphony.com/
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