VICTOR HUGO VÉLEZ

A peek into lutherie workshops around the world

LOCATION Tallinn, Estonia

Ibegan studying lutherie in my native Argentina in 2003, working with violin maker Lionnel Genovart. Six years later I went to Milan to study at the violin making school there, and after spending some time as apprentice in Italy, opened a workshop in Barcelona. At the beginning of 2013 I moved back to Buenos Aires, where I got several orders and at the end of 2014 I went to for a visit to Tallinn. Then I made the craziest decision of my life and decided to open a workshop in the city, even though I spoke no Estonian, no English and no Russian!

When I started, I was relying on the orders I had from customers in South America, Canada and Europe. I was also learning English and practising it every day. Then one of my neighbours, a violinist in the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, recommended me to her colleagues. Now I’ve been here for the past nine years, as one of the very few luthiers based in the city. I’m quite well known in Tallinn, and every day I have more and more local work.

Tallinn is a very musical city with a lot of instrumentalists, which has undoubtedly helped me establish myself here. There’s also a small community of friends from Latin America, and we get together to practise speaking Estonian on Wednesday mornings. The workshop is around 15 sq m, including the kitchen space behind the camera. It also contains one of the most important pieces of equipment in the workshop at the moment – my humidifier, because the winters in Tallinn are cold (it was recently down to -18C) but extremely dry. The humidity can drop to around 20 per cent, so indoors I try to keep it more like 50 per cent. The other thing about working in Tallinn is that I can only rely on good natural light in the spring and summertime, although it’s been good enough to take photos in the past few days.

INTERVIEW BY CHRISTIAN LLOYD

My windows face south, and look out towards Tallinn’s old town. The area is a kind of small cultural quarter with lots of artisan workshops. The city’s central railway station is also nearby, which makes my workshop very convenient for customers.

The left-hand bench is where I work on making and repairing bows. I create them all by hand apart from the frogs, which I buy in from Germany. And I’ve found a pernambuco dealer in Romania who supplies me with top-quality bow wood.

I get a lot of repair work from both players and instrument dealers, and I’ve just finished working on this 19th-century German-made violin. It needed a new bridge, soundpost, tailpiece and pegs.

ALL PHOTOS VICTOR HUGO VÉLEZ

Right Looking towards the kitchen, you can see more of my wood store around the top, as well as my bandsaw, disc sander and UV cabinet on the left. The photos on the right-hand wall were taken by me when I moved in.

Unlike many other luthiers, I prefer to keep instruments in their cases rather than hang them up around the workshop. It keeps them safe and free of the dust that’s always generated while I’m working.

This poster shows the back of a Montagnana cello. I’ve studied it many times, and love the varnish colour, which I’ve often tried to copy. The cello mould next to it is based on Stradivari’s 1712 ‘Davidov’, which I took from The Strad’s poster.