Luthier
After studying at the international Newark School of Violin Making in England, Frédéric Chaudière returned to Montpellier in 1986 to set-up his workshop and make his instruments.
In 1989 and 1992, he won first prize for sound in the Maurice Vieux Viola Competition.
His violins, violas and cellos are played by renowned soloists around the world, including: Jean Jacques Kantorow, Ruggiero Ricci, Norbert Brainin of the Amadeus Quartet, Igor Ozim, Alexander Sitkovetski, Gilles Apap, Rainer Moog, Young-Chang Cho and many more.
Frédéric Chaudière is president of AIMM (International Music Academy of Montpellier), an association whose eminent professors come to Montpellier each year to give master classes and concerts during the Radio France Festival.
He is also the scientific expert for the 2008 Stradivari exhibition being held at the Fabre Museum, which is bringing together 15 masterpieces by the Cremonese master. These instruments will be used on opening night at the Radio France Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon Festival in a special concert featuring an orchestra with a total of 20 Stradivaris !
The ANTONIO STRADIVARI exhibition catalogue is available.
"Antonio Stradivari" Ed. Actes Sud ISBN 978-2-7427-7899-7
In 1998, Norbert Brainin asked Frédéric Chaudière to make a copy of his violin, the 1713 Gibson Stradivari. Not only famous as one of the most beautiful Stradivari instruments, the violin also has an incredible history. It was stolen in 1936 and played for 50 years in restaurants and jazz clubs on the east coast of the United States. The Stradivarius was sometimes even used as an ashtray by the hopeless kleptomaniac who had stolen it.
You can read the whole story in Frédéric Chaudière’s Tribulations of a Stradivarius in America (Actes Sud) and Geschichte einer Stradivari (Wagenbach). The adventure covers everything from the day the tree with wood for the violin was cut down in 1707, to the Joshua Bell concert at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2004.