Lady Blunt Stradivarius — £9.8 million
This beautiful instrument was made in 1721 and is named after Lord Byron’s granddaughter, Lady Anne Blunt, who owned it for 30 years. Prized for their incomparable sound, just 600 of these violins were made by the Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari about 300 years ago. This model was sold last for more than four times the previous auction record for a Stradivarius.
Dizzy Gillespie’s Martin Committee B-flat trumpet — £34,000
With his beret, horn-rimmed glasses and pouched cheeks, Dizzy Gillespie was an icon of jazz music. His trademark trumpet was bent after someone sat on it in 1953, and the maestro found that he preferred the sound that it made.
John Lennon’s Steinway Model Z — £1.45 million
This fairly ordinary, walnut upright piano still bears cigarette burns attributed to its famous owner. It was originally bought by Lennon in December 1970, and he used it to compose and record Imagine. It became the most expensive piano in the world when it was bought in 2000 by British pop singer George Michael , who outbid fellow musicians Robbie Williams and Noel and Liam Gallagher. Michael later described the instrument as the “cheapest-looking piano you’ve ever seen”.
Reach out to Asia Fender Stratocaster — £1.57 million
This guitar raised an enormous sum for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 when members of the royal family from the Middle Eastern emirate of Qatar sold it for charity. It was adorned with the signatures of musical icons such as Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney and Liam Gallagher.
Keith Moon’s drum kit — £139,650
The legendary Keith Moon — or Moon the Loon, as he came to be known because of his bizarre antics on and off stage with The Who — was one the greatest of all rock drummers. Moon’s custom-made 1968 Premier drum kit, which had been valued at £15,000, was sold for well over the odds in 2004 after a bidding war that was won by an anonymous American collector.
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Would you like to play a multimillion-pound Stradivarius?
If you’re a budding young violinist, you could win the chance to play a Stradivarius and have your performance recorded in a professional studio.
This amazing competition celebrates the release of the new ABRSM violin syllabus in conjunction with puresolo.com, the website that enables musicians to record their own versions of well-known pieces over high-quality backing tracks.
If you are 15 or younger and based in the UK, you can take part in the competition by submitting your own version of one of the violin tracks on the new ABRSM syllabus.
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Just log on to abrsm.org/puresolo