Europe's Finest

At the Edinburgh Festival, three famed fiddlers were unable to decide who should take which part in Vivaldi's Concerto for Three Violins last week, ended up by drawing lots. Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin drew first and third. The second part went to Italy's Gioconda de Vito, 46, all but unknown in the U.S. but usually called Europe's No. 1 woman violinist.

Edinburgh has featured a three-century capsule history of violin music this year, so it was only fitting that Italy, home of the violin, should send Gioconda de Vito, along with the string-strong Rome Symphony Orchestra, the Virtuosi di Roma, and Conductors Vittorio Gui and Fernando Previtali.* De Vito and her countrymen have been among the hits of the festival.

Violinist de Vito, a handsome, erect woman with grey hair and dark eyes, was opening-night soloist. On the concert stage, she showed her Latin dash at once, tucking her violin under her chin with a flourish, then working both hands in the air to limber them before attacking the music. Her tone had none of the acid brilliance of a Heifetz, but in roundness and warmth resembled Kreisler's. She scorned fireworks or virtuosity. "She is an artist," said one De Vito fan, "not a virtuoso." In the Vivaldi concerto last week her violin was warm and passionate, blending with the stronger tones of Stern and Menuhin in a performance which all but capped the festival.

Troublesome Tunes. Gioconda de Vito was born in the south Italian hill town of Martina Franca, locally famed for its bandits, where her father was a well-to-do owner of vineyards. Music was in the air, and she was picking out tunes on the mandolin before she was four, soon switched to the violin. Curiously, she could not (and still cannot) carry a tune. This failure almost cost her the chance to study at the Pesaro conservatory, but her fiddling got her by, and in two years she had carried away all available prizes. At 17 she won a violin professorship at the Bari conservatory.

Her family objected to an international career, and De Vito did not seem to mind staying at home. She did go to Paris in the early '30s, and played Bach for an enthusiastic Arturo Toscanini. "That's the way Bach should be played," said the Maestro. But De Vito had no great interest in becoming a touring soloist. What pleased her most was the unique honor of being named, in 1944, a lifetime professor at Rome's St. Cecilia Academy, one of the oldest musical institutions in the world.

Hard to Please. In 1946 De Vito ventured as far as England, where she met David Bicknell, an executive of the H.M.V. record company. He promptly persuaded her to make some recordings and to appear with several British and European orchestras, and her true international career began.

In 1949 she married Bicknell, now spends a good part of each year in England. Hard to please about her own performances, she worked on the Brahms concerto for eleven years before she decided it was ready for the public. It was only recently, almost two decades after that first public performance, that she solved one particular passage to her complete satisfaction.

De Vito has been asked several times to tour the U.S., once actually signed a contract, but her mother died and she canceled the trip. As a next best thing, RCA Victor plans to release some of her records soon, but De Vito, ever the perfectionist, is underjoyed. "I don't like any of them," she says.

* The Italian government also sent one of its prize possessions, the "Tuscan" Stradivarius, which it bought this year for about $50,000 and lent to Violinist de Vito for life.

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