The people who cheered for the young violin soloist with the Charlotte Symphony last weekend might want to think a few grateful thoughts about a key player who was nowhere in sight: the Bank of America executive who helped equip Chad Hoopes to make so much of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto.

Someone with Hoopes' flair, finesse and spontaneity could probably hit home with almost any old fiddle. But Hoopes plays an instrument by the man who is synonymous with great violins: Antonio Stradivari.

How does a 12th-grader from Cleveland - even a contest-winning one - get hold of a Strad? It wasn't his prize for winning the Yehudi Menuhin violin competition. The last sentence of his official bio, printed in the program wherever he plays, says Hoopes uses the violin - which will have its 300th birthday next year - "courtesy of Jonathan Moulds."

Moulds is a British violin collector. And he may be the highest-ranking BofA executive whom most people in the bank's hometown have never heard of: BofA's London-based president for Europe and chief executive of Merrill Lynch International. The last sentence of his official bio says: "He is a keen collector of fine musical instruments."

That's putting it mildly. A 2006 newspaper profile says Moulds owned three Strads and one violin by another revered maker, Giuseppe Guarnieri del Gesu.

When he isn't tending to BofA and Merrill, Moulds leads a group working to increase private-sector support for the arts in Great Britain. And he still plays the violin. As he told the newspaper: "It keeps me sane."

Farley has WSJ dancing

If you go by the Wall Street Journal's dance critic, Charlotte-born Silas Farley must be a prize pupil at the New York City Ballet's school.

In a retrospective on NYCB's winter season, the Journal's Robert Greskovic mentions a Jan. 22 performance - a tribute to company founder George Balanchine - that concluded by spotlighting Balanchine's brainchild, the company's school.

Peter Martins, the company's artistic director, "conducted a ballet class onstage with advanced students from NYCB's School of American Ballet," Greskovic writes.

"The ... demonstration revealed a none-to-impressive selection of young dancers. Few presented any especially eye-catching expertise, through the strikingly tall, handsome and poised Silas Farley stood out."