For years, Colin Maki and his associates — purveyors of some of the finest and rarest violins ever made — had been circling the Playfair, an ultra-rare model crafted by the famed luthier Guarneri “del Gesù” in 1741. Little is known about the Playfair’s passage through the centuries, but its profile suggests a life spent moving between gifted hands. It was last sold by W.E. Hill & Sons, a storied London shop. From there, Maki says, it passed to “a noteworthy collector, then another one, and then a very prominent musician,” who eventually chose to part with it, relinquishing the instrument to Maki and entrusting him to find a player worthy of continuing its legacy.
“An opportunity arose,” Maki says, “to play matchmaker.” The artist they landed on was a 24-year-old from San Gabriel, who plays both violin and piano: Ray Ushikubo.
Ushikubo has performed at Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall, appeared on NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” and won numerous awards including the Davidson Fellow Laureate Award and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. Now comes one of his greatest feats: his debut on the Playfair, one of the most exceptional instruments in violin history.
Asked what the Playfair is worth, Maki shakes his head. “I’d rather not go into that, for reasons of discretion.” After a nudge, he allows only: “It’s well into the eight figures.”
That such a violin should surface for loan is astonishing enough; that it should be placed with such a young artist, who has spent most of his life studying at the Colburn School across the street from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, feels momentous.
“The opportunity to have access to a violin of this vintage is really quite rare,” Maki says. Together with his colleague Aurélien Fort Pederzoli, Maki began the search. It was Pederzoli who thought of Robert Lipsett — a Colburn instructor who has taught Ushikubo for the past 16 years — and called to inquire who he would deem worthy of such an instrument. Within days, they flew Ushikubo out to play for them.
In Ushikubo they found, as Pederzoli puts it, “not only an extraordinary musician, but someone with extraordinary character. He has the composure of a musician well beyond his years.” Ushikubo is charming and affable, with a poise that radiates outward. He sits straight, eyes bright, maintaining contact with subtle showmanship.
For the past few months, he has been learning the violin’s temperament. “We communicate with each other,” he says. “I say: I want this, what can you offer me?” At first they misunderstood each other, as many new companions do. But soon the violin seemed to mold itself to him. “When I put my chin down, it feels like I’ve been playing it for years.”
He carries it everywhere. He enters Colburn’s 400-capacity Zipper Hall, where he will debut it on Dec. 3, with the case slung lightly on his back. When he opens it, the violin gleams with the sheen of a freshly split chestnut. It is scarcely believable that this instrument is 284 years old. Fewer than 200 of these violins were ever made.
“I’m only 24,” Ushikubo says. “This instrument is from 1741. It’s older than the United States. I can barely comprehend that amount of history.” Then he smiles. “But mostly I feel happiness. And honor. It sounds better than any violin that’s ever been made.”
Demonstrating the instrument, he removes his bracelets and jacket, steadies his breath, rests his chin on the violin as if preparing for impact. Slowly brushing his bow against the instrument, he closes his eyes, and looks almost on the verge of tears. His vibrato is disciplined and finely grained; when he moves up and down the neck, the motion is smooth as a jet plane lifting into altitude.
Del Gesù instruments tend to be dark, rich in color, with a tremendous power that fills a hall with little effort on the player’s part. Ushikubo remembers tuning the Playfair for the first time a couple of months ago. “There was a shine to it that I hardly recognized,” he says. To test it, he played a Tchaikovsky concerto, spanning its high and middle registers, finding sounds he “didn’t even know violins were capable of.” He describes its palette as chocolate: white to dark, streaked with caramel.
For his debut, Ushikubo will perform four maximalist Romantic pieces: Tomaso Antonio Vitali’s “Chaconne in G minor,” Nathan Milstein’s “Paganiniana,” Ernest Chausson’s “Poème” and Maurice Ravels’ “Tzigane.” They trace his own coming of age. “Every one of these pieces has made me grow,” he says. He admits he hates practicing. “But these pieces remind me why I do this.”
His path to this moment began with a Japanese TV show he watched as a child, featuring a charismatic violinist-pianist he quickly came to idolize. He begged his parents for a violin. For his sixth birthday, they bought him a $20 instrument from a local shop. Soon they discovered Colburn, and spent years driving him 90 minutes each way between Riverside and downtown L.A. for lessons, before moving to San Gabriel. He studied there until 17, then went to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and returned to Colburn to pursue his master’s; he’s now completing his artist diploma, a highly selective post-graduate program at Colburn. A typical day of practice lasts around 10 hours, divided between piano and violin, an arrangement that Sel Kardan, president and chief executive of Colburn, calls “unprecedented.”
Ushikubo is one of a handful of Colburn students poised for lifelong solo or chamber careers. The school’s in-house management program, Colburn Artists, aims to shepherd musicians like him toward professional life, helping them build repertoire and shape his image. Kardan describes Ushikubo as “very compelling onstage, with great virtuosity. He absorbs music.” But even with the school’s infrastructure behind him, the experience of playing the Playfair exists outside any practical career calculus; it marks an inflection point, a rare chance to inhabit history while shaping it.
Asked how he’ll feel if the indefinite loan of the Playfair ever ends, Ushikubo pauses. “I’ll grieve it,” he says, setting the instrument down and zipping it back up into its case. Although this could be the rarest instrument he’ll ever play, he remains resolute: “For the rest of my life, I hope to discover new sounds every day.”
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