Tom Strini
Tom Strini teaches journalism, music and art courses at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he is editor of The Corvallis Review (https://corvallisreview.blogspot.com/). He holds BMus and MMus degrees in theory/comp and classical guitar performance. He was music and dance critic at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for 27 years and senior editor and a managing partner at Third Coast Daily, an arts-centric online magazine, for four years. He is married to Lee Ann Garrison, an artist and director of the School of the Arts and Communication at Oregon State.
1 comment By Tom Strini
As music and dance critic at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and then for online publications in Frank's home city for nearly 32 years, I heard him play countless times on three different instruments: The "Dushkin" and "Lipinski" Strads (long-term loans from anonymous benefactors) and his own c. 1625 Amati. His musical personality blended with each in very distinct ways.
Frank is a sensitive, subtle player with a particular ear for lush tonal beauty. He sounded great on all three instruments, but in the Lipinski he met his soul mate. Furthermore, I could hear his relationship with that Strad deepen over time in a way that I could not detect with the Dushkin or the Amati. They grew more profound together.
We were pleased to present Frank in Corvallis, Ore., where we now live, in the fall of 2015. I can report that in the gap of 18 months in which I did not hear him play, he and the violin had blossomed markedly. The most gripping piece on that program was Bach's Chaconne, which explored every corner of that player-instrument relationship in telling and infinitely varied detail. After a second concert, over in Bend, Oregon, Henry Sayer, the eminent art historian and a vastly sophisticated human, said to me: "I never really understood the Chaconne until tonight."
Frank is right. It's not about volume or overtones, it's about the expressive possibilities that open up as a player and an instrument develop a relationship over time.
Commented on: 4 August 2017
Blind testing Strads and Guarneris misses a fundamental point