Janine Jansen's violin strings: the Pirastro Evah Pirazzi Neo co-developer, sourced

Janine Jansen is one of the most commercially and critically successful classical violinists of her generation. Born 1978 in Soest, Netherlands. Recording career on Decca Classics since 2003, with notable releases including her debut Bach Inventions and Partita, the 2004 Vivaldi Four Seasons recording that crossed her into the broader classical-listening mainstream, the 2007 Tchaikovsky and Britten Concertos with the Mariss Jansons-conducted Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and the 2021 12 Stradivari project where she recorded on twelve different Stradivari instruments coordinated with lending institutions and private collectors worldwide.

The instrument is the Shumsky-Rode Stradivari (1715) on long-term loan from a private collector. Her string set is Pirastro Evah Pirazzi Neo — the only violin string product in our catalog that has a documented co-development credit between a Tier-1 soloist and the manufacturer's technical director.

Pirastro Evah Pirazzi Neo on the Shumsky-Rode Strad. The Neo set is Pirastro's 2020 launch of a redesigned-for-Jansen variant of regular Evah Pirazzi, focused on rebalancing the G string after Jansen reported its projection didn't match the A and D in concerto halls.

Her direct quote on the launch, from the Strings Magazine coverage: "Excellent malleable sound, big, powerful, centered, noble and luminous." The Neo description on Pirastro's product page leans on those four adjectives — centered and noble in particular are now the marketing framing for Neo across the product line.

The Shumsky-Rode Strad is a projection-forward instrument by design — Stradivari's 1715 instruments are among the most-respected concert-hall violins for their ability to fill 1,500 to 3,000-seat halls without amplification. Pairing it with a soloist set engineered for projection (Evah Pirazzi family) makes more sense than pairing it with a balanced-warm set like Thomastik Dominant; the Strad's response is what bloomed Pirastro's design choice in the first place.

The G-string redesign in Neo addresses a specific concerto-hall problem that's invisible to listeners but central to soloists: when you're playing a concerto like the Tchaikovsky or Brahms, the lowest string carries some of the most expressive content (the opening of the Brahms Concerto, the second-movement themes in Tchaikovsky), and if that string doesn't project as much as the upper strings, the soloist has to over-bow to compensate. Neo's redesigned G removes that compensation requirement.

Jansen is a documented Pirastro endorser at the highest tier — co-development credit, direct quote at product launch, ongoing use across her recording catalog. Per our sourcing taxonomy: endorsed, primary-source verified.

The relationship is unusual in the violin string industry. Most Tier-1 soloists have informal endorsements where the manufacturer mentions them on a product page but the player is using strings off the catalog. Jansen's relationship with Pirastro is a true product-development collaboration; Neo wouldn't exist (in its current form) without her input. That makes her the canonical primary-source anchor for the Neo product page.