The great violinist Michael Rabin would have been 90 years old this May. Here, Jonathan Woolf details his instruments and bows
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This is an excerpt from The Strad May 2026 feature, ’Michael Rabin: a brief flame’. Read the full article here
For his Australian tour in 1952, Michael Rabin used a violin that is purported to have been a c.1724 Guarneri ‘del Gesù’. Soon he was loaned an Amati by Rembert Wurlitzer, but he exchanged it for a 1703 Guarneri ‘filius Andreae’.
By 1958 he needed a much better instrument, and if he’d had the funds, he could have bought the ‘Kochanski’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ of 1741; but instead he acquired – for $26,500, from William Moennig & Son in Philadelphia – the ‘Kubelík’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ of 1735 (above), which had been on loan to him.
It had previously belonged to Horace Petherick and then to a player called Townley. In 1885 it was in the hands of Henry Osborne Havemeyer, then from 1931 to 1935 it was owned by Czech virtuoso Jan Kubelík. It was then bought by Alexander Hilsberg, concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who kept it until 1952. Rabin owned it from 1958 until his death in 1972. Among his bows were four by Joseph Arthur Vigneron, one by W.E. Hill & Sons and another by Jean-Jacques Millant.
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