By MARTHA WAGGONER
Associated Press
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – When a musician plays a violin long enough, the instrument is imprinted with its owner’s way of making sound. If someone else picks it up, they learn to play it in a way that honors its history.
So when David Russell places a violin played in the World War II concentration camp of Auschwitz under his chin, he lets the violin tell him how to do it. The Auschwitz violin and 17 others with connections to the vanished world of Europe’s prewar Jewish communities are part of a new exhibit and performance series called “Violins of Hope.”
“When the violinists in ‘Violins of Hope’ play these instruments and they find how to make these instruments sound their best, they’re actually bringing back patterns from the former performers who used to play them,” said Russell, a music professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. “So we get an imprint, as it were, of that person. They’re with us, they’re in the concert.”