Violin shops have always fascinated me. The feel, the smell, the seemingly endless display of instruments, bows, cases, strings - all you could ever want, contained in a few hundred square feet. I remember finally getting the courage up to ask a shop in New York if I could play a few of their old Italian instruments, to which they were surprisingly generous. I fell immediately in love with a Gennaro Gagliano - way out of my range, of course. But that sparked a new hobby for me: going around to different cities and shops and seeing what they had in that back room. I must have played over 100 ludicrously expensive instruments in the past ten years. And we've all witnessed that sad fact: price tags going ever higher, even more a distant dream to ever own one.

In creating a network of string players, mostly on the West Coast, I act as instrument liaison between sellers and buyers. By avoiding the high commissions of most violin shops, sellers can actually reap some of the reward of rising values of their instruments, and buyers can know for certain that they're not being taken to the cleaners.

Like many, I got interested in period instruments in college, and never turned back. As the director of the Montana Baroque Festival, longtime member of Portland Baroque Orchestra, violinist for Grammy-nominated El Mundo, and Program Director at the Oregon Bach Festival's Berwick Academy, my ear is well-tuned to the period instrument world.
You can hear some of my playing here and here.

Adam LaMotte