Violin as Investment
So how does an 18-year-old, barely out of school, have exclusive use of an instrument worth perhaps £300,000? Young virtuosi have always depended on patronage. Nicola Benedetti, who at 16 became BBC Young Musician of the Year two years after Pike, now plays the “Earl Spencer” Stradivarius (c1712), courtesy of Jonathan Moulds, Bank of America’s president for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Scan the biographical note in the programme at one of Pike’s concerts, however, and you’ll see that her instrument belongs to “the Jennifer Pike Violin Trust established by Nigel Brown”. Former chairman of the NW Brown Group, the Cambridge-based venture capitalist Brown – who now runs IQ Capital Partners and also runs musical instrument schemes through The Stradivari Trust – made his money in investment management and has long loved music (he is himself an amateur violinist and plays a copy of a del Gesù once owned by Paganini, known as “I1 Canone”). Rather than simply acquire and lend instruments of the highest quality to outstanding young musicians, which would inevitably limit the number he could help, Brown – who has provided “grand” instruments to “24 or 25” string-players to date – applies a business model to his philanthropy.
