On Monday, November 14, 1960, the Idaho State Journal reviewed the opening concert of the Idaho State-Civic Symphony's season, played the night before in Frazier Hall at Idaho State College in Pocatello. The guest soloist was a Salt Lake City violinist, but later in the review came a name familiar in Arbon Valley. According to the reviewer, the instrument in the soloist's hands was the property of Clyde Jenson, "an Arbon Valley wheat farmer and a member of the symphony."
Clyde was then about 55. He was the son of Joseph C. and Alice Jenson, who had homesteaded at Summit, and he had kept the family's dry farm going after his father's death in 1929. Five years earlier, in November 1955, the Salt Lake Tribune had reported that he was lending a violin credited to Guarneri "del Gesù" to the Utah Symphony's concertmaster. That story is told in an earlier post in this series.
Two violins
The 1960 review adds something new. The soloist, Percy Kalt, played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto on a violin the paper called a 1704 Stradivarius, after Antonio Stradivari, the violin maker of Cremona, Italy, who died in 1737. The reviewer said the instrument was Jenson's. Jenson himself sat in the orchestra that night with a second old violin, which the reviewer called his Guarnerius, and he had handed the Stradivarius to Kalt only that afternoon. The two men already shared a history with it. By the reviewer's account, the violin first reached Salt Lake City some years earlier as part of a dealer's consignment that held four or five other Stradivari instruments. Jenson bought his from that group, and Kalt had already had it under his bow during its stay in Utah.
So by 1960 Clyde Jenson owned two old Italian violins, or at least two violins that went by those makers' names. The Guarnerius he played in Pocatello was probably the del Gesù of 1955, though no paper read here says so in as many words. The review does not say who had judged either violin genuine. Like the 1955 column, it gives the attributions as they came to the writer.
A solo for the Singing Mothers
Nine years later the violin was in the paper again. On Sunday, November 30, 1969, the Idaho State Journal announced a Christmas concert by the Singing Mothers of the Pocatello Stake, the women's Relief Society choruses of the Latter-day Saint wards there. The date set was Friday, December 5, at 7:30 in the evening, the place was the stake house on South Grant, and anyone could come without paying. According to the notice, "Clyde Jensen of Arbon Valley" was on the program twice: once alone, playing a solo on his 1704 Stradivarius, and again as the choir's violin accompanist. The spelling differs, but the place and the violin leave little doubt that this was Clyde Jenson. No report of the concert itself has been found, so whether he played as announced is not known.
What the papers settle, and what they do not
The family's own story has long included the Stradivarius. In the 1982 book Bannock Valley, quoted in the account of Clyde's life on this site, a woman who had known him from childhood recalled a visit to his Arbon ranch at which he fetched his Stradivarius and played it. The 1955 post found only the del Gesù in the papers and left open whether the family's Stradivarius and the Tribune's del Gesù were one instrument. These two Pocatello reports go far toward settling that question: in 1960 Jenson owned both a violin called a Stradivarius and one called a Guarnerius, and the review named both.
The family account also says Clyde played in the Utah Symphony. The 1960 review points elsewhere. In it, the Utah Symphony musician was the visiting soloist, while Jenson, called a member of the symphony, played in the Pocatello orchestra. When he died in 1983, his obituary in the Logan Herald Journal said he had graduated from the Virtuoso Music School in Buffalo, New York, in 1929, and named farming and music as the two main interests of his life. It said he played the violin with the Cache Chamber Orchestra. None of the papers read here say how long he played with the Pocatello symphony, when exactly he bought the Stradivarius, or what became of either violin.
On this site: Clyde Jenson, his father Joseph Christensen Jenson, the Jenson family, the Summit area and the 1955 post on Clyde Jenson's "del Gesù" violin.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, November 14, 1960, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — An Arbon Valley wheat farmer's violin, described in the review as a Stradivarius dated 1704, carried the solo part on Sunday night, November 13, as the Idaho State-Civic Symphony began its 1960–61 season in Frazier Hall at Idaho State College. Percy Kalt of Salt Lake City played it in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major.
Clyde Jenson, the farmer in question, was himself one of the symphony's players, and on this evening he took his own seat in the orchestra holding a second old violin, which the reviewer named as his Guarnerius. The loan was arranged that same afternoon. Kalt and the Stradivarius were not strangers. According to the review, Jenson had acquired it several years before from a dealer who brought it to Salt Lake City in a lot of five or six Strads, and Kalt had tried it out during that visit.
The reviewer, who signed himself L.E., had high praise for the soloist. Backstage afterward, Kalt sounded half-apologetic, telling the reviewer that between giving lessons and his nightly work with the Utah Symphony he had little chance to rehearse. L.E. would have none of it. In L.E.'s judgment the playing was brilliant, and while the famous instrument might have added something, it was the soloist's skill that won the audience over.
The reviewer put Kalt's age at roughly 30. A Salt Lake City native, he had trained mainly in his home city, apart from summer study at Aspen, Colorado. He now sat among the Utah Symphony's second violins; earlier, while stationed in Germany with the Army, he had been a member of the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra.
Under Hal Mealy of the college's music faculty, the orchestra's own program was Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, Bach's Air for the G String, and the Overture and Allegro from Couperin's La Sultane as arranged by Darius Milhaud. By L.E.'s reckoning, nothing the orchestra had offered in several seasons matched its work that night. Only a small audience came, which he regretted, and he pointed readers to December 11, the date of the next concert.