Gioconda de Vito was born in the south Italian hill town of Martina Franca. She was picking out tunes on the mandolin before she was four, but soon switched to the violin. At 17 she won a violin professorship at the Bari conservatory.
Her family objected to an international career, and De Vito did not seem to mind staying at home. She did go to Paris in the early '30s, and played Bach for an enthusiastic Arturo Toscanini. "That's the way Bach should be played," said the Maestro. But De Vito had no great interest in becoming a touring soloist. What pleased her most was the unique honor of being named, in 1944, a lifetime professor at Rome's St. Cecilia Academy, one of the oldest musical institutions in the world. The Italian government also sent one of its prize possessions, the "Tuscan" Stradivarius, which it bought this year for about $50,000 and lent to Violinist de Vito for life.
In 1946 De Vito travelled to England, where she met David Bicknell, an executive of the H.M.V. record company. He promptly persuaded her to make some recordings and to appear with several British and European orchestras, and her true international career began. In 1949 she married David Bicknell, and so spent much time in the UK. A perfectionist, she worked on the Brahms concerto for eleven years before she decided it was ready for the public.
One of her most famous records is the legendary ASD 429, playing Bach's Violin Concerto in E, and Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5, Kubelik conductor, extremely rare and expensive as an original record but also available as a reissue, which we currently have in stock.
