When your violin string snaps on live TV

When your violin string snaps on live TV

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norman lebrecht

March 08, 2018

It just happened to Kristine Balanas at the Latvian Music Awards.

Comments

  • Michael says:

    Looks like she snapped some horse hair too.

  • Bruce says:

    We had one of those recently. Benjamin Beilmann, Tchaikovsky concerto. Associate Concertmaster was thrilled at the chance to change the E string on a Strad đŸ™‚

    It wasn’t on TV though.

  • RenĂ© says:

    Very good violinist actually, take a look on google and see was placed in ARD in couple of years ago – the full performance is extremely impressive!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ijEIu7Nsr4&t=312s
    Seems like Balanas is definitely one to watch.

  • Petros Linardos says:

    As a teenager, Midori famously broke two strings mid-performance, under Bernstein, and kept going.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkp8YSuePPM

  • buxtehude says:

    Jackie Du Pre breaks her top string a few notes into the last movement of the Dvorak concerto. Ease up to this by listening to her amazing 25-second solo near the end of the 2nd, from 23:55.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_yxtaeFuEQ

    “Two minutes please
    While I change
    My string” — almost a poem.

    This concert was in protest of the Soviet re-occupation of Czechoslovakia; see the UN flag hanging up behind the LSO in the Albert Hall.

    The announcer, improvising, seems to imagine that the concert is ruined, maybe Jackie’s career too, and that Russian tanks are now free to roll toward Vienna.

    Notice also — no other bare arms in the LSO, in fact not a single female player, anywhere.

  • Cyril Blair says:

    Better her violin string than that scanty strap on her dress…

  • jojo says:

    Watch conductor, he’s behind violin and orchestra! Unbelievable! Is it smth like “school concert series” ???

  • Paul Wright says:

    Maxim Vengerov tells a great story, I hope not apocryphal, about an occasion when he suffered the break of a string while playing the Walton concerto. He reached out to the concertmaster to exchange instruments, but the latter seemed very reluctant to comply. It then dawned on him that it was the viola concerto he was playing…

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