You are playing not one but two concerts for solo violin within the space of a few hours at this year’s Lake District Summer Music on 2 August. How did you choose the programmes? I have been researching music for solo violin and I didn’t want just to play the usual stuff – Bach, Ysaÿe, Paganini and so on. So, for the first concert at 11.30am, I thought, ‘What about taking the audience on a little journey?’ and the programme is based on the solitude of the virtuoso. And so we have Lera Auerbach’s Lonely Suite, which she wrote during the isolation of Covid lockdown – what saves you as a performer when there is no audience, when you are alone in your room with no one to play for and the last thing wou want to do is practise? There is also a bit of the idea of story-telling in Prokofiev’s Solo Sonata in the same programme, which has a lot of Kurtág interwoven through it.
And the 3pm concert is entitled ‘Inspired by Bach’… Yes, but in this one I wanted to make a point of not actually playing any Bach but instead constructing a programme that centres on allusions to and melancholy around Bach. So, there is another piece by Auerbach – her par.ti.ta – and works such as Kurtág’s Hommage à J.S.B and a Partita by the Romanian composer Alfred Mendelsohn. In each programme, I feature lesser-known composers and also play a 50:50 balance of men and women composers, as doing both of these is very important
