Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

David Garrett, 26, one of the nation's foremost young concert performers, had an accident that every world-class musician must dread: at the end of a concert at the Barbican he tripped and landed on his violin.

The instrument is a 290-year-old Stradivarius, so rare that it would be almost impossible to estimate its value. . . .

"I was all packed up and ready to go when I slipped," Garrett told the Evening Standard. "People said it was as if I'd trodden on a banana skin. I fell down a flight of steps and on to the case. When I opened it, the violin was in pieces. I couldn't speak and I couldn't get up. I didn't even know if I was hurt – I didn't care. I've had that violin for eight years. It was like losing a friend."

The violin, known by its sobriquet San Lorenzo, is one of about 600 surviving instruments made by Antonio Stradivari. . . .

The nearest another musician has come to suffering a similar disaster was when Peter Stumpf, a performer from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, came home tired one evening in 2004 and absent-mindedly left his 1684 Stradivarius cello on his front doorstep. Video security footage showed a youth stealing it and struggling to escape on a bicycle, crashing into dustbins on his way.

It was found three days later by a nurse, who gave it to her boyfriend, a carpenter, who offered to turn it into a CD rack.