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Searching for a Cello

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So one day at rehearsal, Bob made his move. He told Des, "If you ever decide you don't want the cello, I'd like to try it out." Des agreed.

When rehearsals finally moved to the orchestra pit, Des tried the Storioni in its real element. To Des, it sounded no better in the concert hall than in the practice room. He confided to Bob, "I'm not sure this is the cello for me."

Bob secretly rejoiced. He tried hard to be discouraging. "Des," he said, "don't settle for second best. Keep looking."

Des rang up the dealer and got permission to let Bob give the cello a whirl. Bob, who'd been playing a 19th-century French cello, grew only more smitten with the Storioni. By comparison, it made his French cello sound sterile. And the traits that had bothered Des worked in Bob's favor. In Bob's supporting position in the symphony's cello section, he didn't need an instrument with a commanding presence. And he also often performs in string quartets or piano trios, where he needs something that doesn't bark louder than the other chamber players. He bought the Storioni.

Bob, at least, had found his perfect cello.

A year after Des passed on the Storioni, he got the chance to buy a late-18th-century Tononi. He took it for acoustical spins in Jones Hall and concert halls at Rice University, and asked his usual suspects to listen: Shaw and symphony cellists Chris French and Jeff Butler.

His colleagues loved the Tononi's colorful overtones. Its palette was so rich with hues and tints that the tone of Des's chocolate-brown Guadagnini, by comparison, resembled a canvas awash with nothing but reds.

But Des lost faith in the dealer. The cello's owner, who lived in Vienna, needed to make a quick six figures on the sale to pay for another cello, and conservative Des disliked the dealer's high-pressure sales tactics. He also felt uneasy about the price -- inflated, he thought, by at least $100,000.

But what scared him most was the dealer's eagerness for Des to trade in his chocolate-brown Guadagnini as part of the deal. "All my personality and all that I'd done were in this cello," says Des. He worried that the Tononi might somehow not work out -- and that his trusty Guadagnini would be gone before he could rectify matters.

Certainly, the stakes were high enough to make anyone nervous. At 37, Des has attained the tier of success next to stardom, but this cello would require a huge fraction of his income. Last year Houston Symphony cellists earned a respectable base salary of $63,700 a year. Des makes more as first chair and earns a bit more by teaching cello performance at Rice's Shepherd School of Music. But still, a quarter of a million is a huge amount of money to him; his cello will likely cost several times more than his house. And the more expensive it is, the more costly a mistake could be.

Des said no to the Tononi, and the dealer quickly sold it elsewhere. Des now thinks he made a mistake: The Tononi was one worth keeping.

Three years ago Des met fellow Canadian Alison Hendry in Houston, after a mutual friend introduced them. They were married in a year. At 34, the gregarious, fair-headed Alison is abandoning her former career as an obstetrical nurse to design costumes for the theater. Fittings and rehearsals keep her busy while Des does solo concerts out of town. In the living room of their one-story ranch home in Knollwood Village, she giggles when she discusses her former life with Julian Armour, a cellist who runs the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival. She and Julian learned the pitfalls of cello shopping firsthand when he dragged her searching all over New York before settling on a $40,000 English model.

Alison quips that if Des ever manages to buy his perfect cello, he'll be denying her a new house and college for their future kids. Des motions at her to get serious. Her voice still sunny, Alison explains that really Des's goals and hers are the same. "I want him to play something he wants to play. The happier he is, the more fun he is to live with. He's an artist."

Sometime after Des refused to buy the Tononi, he found out that its scroll -- the carved piece of curled wood above the peg box over the neck -- had been fashioned by someone other than Tononi. A cello's scroll can make up 20 to 30 percent of its value; though it makes little difference to the instrument's sound, the original scroll adds significantly to the cello's value as an antique.

Des later discovered that the cellist who ended up buying the Tononi had the mismatched scroll removed and had a genuine Tononi scroll pieced onto the neck. Since then, Des has learned the instrument has been reappraised at around $400,000 -- nearly double the price he first thought was too much, even when he believed the scroll to be the original.

That knowledge has made Des even more cautious. "I could buy an instrument that one expert tells me is a Stradivari, get all my friends together, buy the thing for a few million dollars and try to sell it four years later. And someone can say, 'That's not a Strad. That's worth $100.' Who's right?"

Des has heard from his friend Jeff Butler what can happen when experts squabble over a cello's origins. Last November a Midwest rare-instrument dealer turned Jeff on to a fine 19th-century Italian model selling for 80,000 English pounds (about $130,000) in a London shop. "It would be worth the plane ride to see it," his friend told him. Jeff valued the friend's judgment, so he took a chance and flew to London to check it out. When he got there, he liked what he heard.

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