Violin Virtuosity Favors the Female

Above: Utah Symphony Orchestra; Kathryn Eberle, Associate Concertmaster and violin soloist. Mozart. Concerto #1 in B Flat Major for Violin 19. St. Mary's Catholic Church, Park City, UT. 19 July 2022.

Fabulous performance. Eberle's mastery of her craft evident in her seemingly surreal finger dexterity on the strings. Her virtuosity causes me to reflect, once again, on the too much disdained reality of gender distinctiveness. Hint: Females are nimbler than males with their fingers. Herbert Von Karahan's Berlin Philharmonic, through the end of the 20th century, by policy, had no female members. For me, it stands to reason that females, because of manual dexterity advantages over males, can compete favorably with males, to reach the apex of violin mastery.

Circa 2015 TIMDT and Mwah (sic) were visiting a tea plantation in south India. I asked the plantation manager why the tea pickers were all female? He said, ingenuously, "Women have smaller fingers. They are more dexterous. Also, we can't rely on men to pick tea. Men, too often, don't return from lunch to work." Men and women are different. On the whole, we should expect gender differences to impact on performance capability for any given activity. On a level playing field, all other things being equal (caveat: things are always not equal!) achieving violin virtuosity favors the female.

The desire of females to compete at sports and activities where males have a natural advantage has always been puzzling to me, particularly when women have their own physical advantages over men to exploit. Watching Eberle perform, without being gender handicapped, at the top of her métier was a real joy to me. Why wouldn't a female want to aspire to becoming a prima ballerina, say, rather than emulate the over celebrated Megan Rapinoe, who couldn't make an average male junior college soccer team?

At the end of last night's concert, I was in a brief conversation with Steven Brosvik, Utah Symphony and Opera CEO. I mentioned to him how Von Karahan wouldn't accept women in his symphony and how that probably, as good as the Berlin was, it drew from a sub-optimized talent pool in selecting its top musicians. Brosvik agreed and noted how much better off classical music performance is today with women aspiring to reach the top of classical music performance capability.

Incidentally, TIMDT and Mwah (sic) attended a performance of The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Tokyo, Japan in the early eighties. Old and frail, Von Karahan led the all-male orchestra from a stool seat. The experience was electric.... as you would expect it to be for the performance of an apex orchestral ensemble. Also, TIMDT and Mwah (sic) were amazed to note the youth of the sold-out audience, mostly in their twenties and thirties.