French Fiddler

French Violinist Christian Ferras, 25, is a darkly handsome young man with a taste for driving sleek, low-slung cars around the Bardot-shaped coast of the French Riviera. He is also the most loudly acclaimed young violinist to emerge from France since the late Ginette Neveu, who died in a 1949 plane crash. Last week Violinist Ferras turned up in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and from the moment he launched into Brahms's familiar D-Major Concerto, it was clear that he had a blazing, romantic vision and the controlled technique to carry it out.

Ferras' legato passages spun out in long, honeyed strands of sound; his attack in the cadenza was as crisp as vellum. Throughout, he displayed a sweeping, rhythmic flair, a fluent, coolly lustrous tone. His Brahms had about it a quality of molded passion that far older artists might envy.

Ferras was born in the seaside town of Le Touquet, the son of a hotel owner who had started to be a violinist but abandoned his career when he cut his left hand on a wine bottle, severing the nerve to his little finger. Father Ferras trained his son until he was 15. Christian won a first prize at the Paris Conservatory, soon afterward made his concert debut in Paris. He has been touring steadily since (England, North Africa, South America).

Ferras says he knew he would be a violinist a year after he touched his first violin, at six, despite the fact that as a boy he fell on a broken bottle on the beach, deeply gashed his left hand in precisely the same place his father once had. "But I was lucky," says Violinist Ferras. "This time it cut no nerves."

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