The auction house Tarisio has gone public on the private sale of a bow to New York Philharmonic concertmaster Frank Huang.
The bow was made in 1864 by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume’s best Parisian bowman, Pierre Simon. It is mounted in ebony and gold.
The price has been kept private.
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Is it, by chance, by $200,000?
; )
One of the unintended effects of an ungraded hall is that the musicians now have to upgrade their instruments to match the upgraded acoustics and then it becomes a race to keep up with your colleagues… which with higher demand, leads to an increase in price in limited edition instruments and bows etc
So that $200,000 raise? It all gets plowed back into the instruments…
If the bow has parts in ebony, the owner must be very careful not to travel with the bow. It can be confiscated to be buried or burned.
Same with ivory! I bought an old bow with an ivory frog for almost nothing because of that!
nope, the vast majority of bows have ebony frogs. Ivory is what you need to be careful with.
No, ebony is not on the list of troublesome materials. Ivory, whalebone, rosewood, and tortoiseshell, on the other hand, can cause considerable headaches.
Huang is certainly a worthy recipient of a great bow. A little internet sleuthing shows that the prices for Pierre Simon bows have been shooting up in recent years, from middle four figures to high four figures then middle five figures until finally a cello bow sold for over $100,000 (of course the prices for all quality bows have been shooting up) . But the Simon prices vary so greatly that I have to assume nice “fittings” have quite a bit to do with it, plus at a certain age so many bows have had cracks repaired which always tends to make them shoe-string relatives. There is also an issue that not all bows marked “Simon” were his work, or were not solely his work.
What the heck? the above comment by “u” was posted by me – David K. Nelson. I don’t know how or when I became “u” but I hope it stops before I am reduced to a mere Abbott and Costello routine.
Great bows make a huge difference in playing and playability. Spiccato’s just fly off the string, up bow & down bow staccato is a new, much easier experience. And that doesn’t include the normal, everyday detache. Just makes such a wonderful playing experience.
You forgot the most important thing. Which is the sound. You cannot get that intoxicatingly airy and sparkly, multilayered sound with ANY violin bow made after about 1910. (Spiccatos are not the reason a fine player buys a bow like this.) To a violinist who has that sound (and kind of salary) under their ear multiple hours a day, it may well be worth it.
A dealer in the UK has a similar bow available for £67,500.
Most likely nobody will be able to tell the difference—a “blindfold test” comparing the two bows would indicate definitively whether it was worth whatever was paid.
The trained player would be able to tell a fine French bow from playing on it blind, even if a listener couldn’t. Maybe not true with violins, but definitely true with bows.
Who cares if your (and others) ears are not good enough to tell. They probably also can’t tell if about intonation, ensemble, articulation, dynamics, tempo. It’s also about how it feels and what can be gotten from the instrument with it. And who cares what it costs? None of anyone’s business. What a nothingburger post! And all the comments about the cost here are pure idiocy.
Simon, the best French bow maker in the Vuillaume shop was Dominique Peccatte. Simon was fantastic, but there is a huge difference in value between a D. Peccatte and Simon bow.
Agreed, you’ll find some Simon bows which might outplay some Peccatte bows, but an “average” Peccatte would be “one of my best” for nearly all makers. And the price tag usually reflects that, unless there are real condition issues. If you’re really leading a charmed life, you might come across a Peccatte that draws a marvelous sound but has significant condition issues (say a replacement frog or adjuster) that don’t affect the playing characteristics. It still won’t be cheap, but everyone who tries it will want to keep it!
Vadis: “One of the unintended effects of an ungraded hall…”
Posts about the NY Phil always grab my attention and interest. This one about Huang’s new bow was perhaps selected by vlogger Lebrecht based on random tidbits on the internet.
As for a formally published article in the NY Times several days ago about Geffen Hall (and its improved acoustics), I still can’t figure out why it was ignored.
I’m guessing the cost of the renovation was way more than the cost of the NYP’s concertmaster’s new bow. So the article about Geffen was no less weighty and relevant.
A “private” sale gone public. What a joke. It is just a bow, a nice one. Nothing more than that.
I actually thought that the bow being referred to was the bow tie which the musician is wearing. It seemed a lot of money for a bow tie. And only true connoisseurs would be able to tell the difference it made to the quality of the music.