Maker Background
After his artistic studies, Michele Dobner attended the Civic School of Violin Making in Milan, graduating in 1990 under Maestro Luca Primon. He began a personal study of the models of the early 20th-century Milanese makers, Gaetano Sgarabotto, Giuseppe Ornati and Ferdinando Garimberti, always with an eye to the classical violin making of Antonio Stradivari.
Quartets became a particular passion: the search for harmony between forms, and for woods chosen to come together into a single, unified sound. For two years he lived in Madrid, where he could study at close quarters the decorated Stradivari quartet kept in the Royal Palace. He has worked in Cremona since 1998.
Most of his instruments are finished and varnished in a modern style; roughly one every two years is made in imitation of an antique instrument of the 20th century, or occasionally of the 18th. In 2008 he received two silver medals at the Violin Society of America competition in Portland, Oregon, for a quartet and for a cello, and in 2009 and 2012 he was a finalist in the cello section of the Triennale in Cremona. By 2021 he had made some 150 instruments, among them 35 cellos and 20 violas, many played by musicians in leading orchestras around the world.
In his own words, the wish to make instruments came at fifteen, on visiting an exhibition of contemporary instruments. Each of his instruments carries a name inside, referring to the "voice" that name gave in its lifetime and that will live on in the instrument. The imitation of the human voice across the family of strings, the violin as soprano, the viola as contralto, the cello as tenor, the double bass as bass, has always guided his research.
