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Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Top violinist Nicola Benedetti confirms she IS married to jazz musician 25 years her senior who she met when she was just 17 - and they have a baby daughter
Top violinist Nicola Benedetti has confirmed she is married to a jazz musician 25 years her senior who she met when she was just 17 years old. The 38-year-old was introduced to celebrated jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, 63, more than 21 years ago in New York when she attended the American Academy of Achievement summit as a student-delegate. At the time, the Scottish violinist was just 17 years old, while Mr Marsalis, of New Orleans, was 42. Speaking publicly about their relationship for the first time, Ms Benedetti, of Ayrshire, has revealed she was a 'huge fan' of the American trumpeter when they initially crossed paths. Having formed a 'certain type of kinship', she said that the pair initially remained 'good friends' for several years, despite their large age gap. They then began a romantic relationship several years later, with the couple welcoming their first child together, a daughter, in May 2024. Now, speaking to The Telegraph about the decision to keep their relationship private for so many years, Ms Benedetti said: 'I don't tend to discuss my private life because people don't come to my concerts because of whom I'm in a relationship with. 'They come because I play the violin'. Ms Benedetti, 38, met celebrated jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, 63, (both pictured) more than 21 years ago in New York when she attended the American Academy of Achievement summit as a student-delegate Mr Marsalis has four other children - two sons, Wynton Jr. and Simeon, with former partner Candace Stanley, a third son, Jasper, whom he shares with actress Victoria Rowell, alongside a daughter, Oni, who he has publicly collaborated with. As a key figure in the 1980s jazz renaissance, he often been referred to as the 'Pied Piper' of Jazz, accumulating up to nine Grammy awards across a career spanning over four decades. Meanwhile, Ms Benedetti, who has strong Italian roots, won the title of BBC Young Musician in 2004 when she was 16 and became the youngest ever recipient of the Queen's Medal for Music in 2017. She shared with The Telegraph that since having a child, she has begun to question elements of her upbringing. Both her and her older sister would be required to practise the violin for up to three hours on a daily basis during the summer holidays. Adding that her 'strict' childhood meant both her and her sister 'feared upsetting our parents', the Scots performer added that she believes the young people of today often 'lack basic discipline in their daily lives'. In 2015, Mr Marsalis composed a violin concerto specifically for Ms Benedetti titled 'Violin Concerto in D', premiered at London's Barbican Centre. The piece, widely considered one of the most popular and beloved violin concertos in the classical repertoire, was described as 'taking inspiration from Ms Benedetti's life as a travelling performer and educator who enlightens and delights communities'. But Ms Benedetti and Mr Marsalis said they could hardly remember who came up with the initial idea, joking in a joint interview: 'It's like a scene from When Harry Met Sally. I don't know if I said it or if she said it.' The couple welcomed their first child, a daughter, in May 2024. Pictured: Ms Benedetti and Mr Marsalis. Pictured: the pair at a reception to celebrate the most talented jazz musicians in London on May 9, 2024 Ms Benedetti, who has strong Italian roots, won the title of BBC Young Musician in 2004 when she was 16 and became the youngest ever recipient of the Queen's Medal for Music in 2017. Just after giving birth in 2024, she was seen attending events with her new-born baby in tow (pictured) Meanwhile, in an interview with the LA Times in 2016, Ms Benedetti gushed about the piece, remarking that the sound was 'truly wild and so quintessentially him', while Mr Marsalis said the favourite part of the concerto for him was simply 'Nicola's sound'. Adding: 'I just like her sound'. In the years following, the pair continued to collaborate on numerous projects. In 2023, Ms Benedetti became the first woman and the first Scot to be appointed director of the Edinburgh International Festival, which takes place every August. Announcing her pregnancy in March 2024, Ms Benedetti told the Times that she was feeling 'positive' and 'excited', adding: 'There is so much unknown. Flexibility will be the aim of the game in the next little while and plenty of support.' In May 2025, nine months after her daughter's birth, she revealed that becoming a mother had 'definitely' changed her and given her a more relaxed attitude to the perfectionism that drove her to international fame. In an interview with Richard Morrison for The Times, she said: 'Throughout my life I have been so concerned with what could happen, or what did happen, or what could have been done better. 'I used to analyse again and again every note of the performance I'd just done, or the recording I'd just made. 'So I was always living either in the past or the future. Since my daughter was born, I have learnt to live in the present and just be grateful to be here.' She also added: 'I've not done any big concerts since giving birth. Just a bit of playing in the [Edinburgh] Festival and one or two small private concerts.' However, just weeks after giving birth, she was seen attending events with her new-born baby in tow, including promoting Scottish Opera's Oedipus Rex with her daughter in a sling. She also took her daughter with her when she appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today Show where she discussed funding for the arts and performed violin piece Ashokan Farewell by Jay Ungar. Mr Marsalis currently serves as the artistic director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center, in New York, the site of where the pair first met all those years ago. In January 2009, he performed to President Obama alongside an exclusive crowd of 100 guests at his inauguration party. Meanwhile, Ms Benedetti also serves as founder of music education charity The Benedetti Foundation, which has inspired more than 100,000 young musicians. In March 2024, the foundation responded to the news of Ms Benedetti's pregnancy in a celebratory post that read: 'We are so thrilled for our founder and artistic director Nicky Benedetti who has announced she is expecting a baby in May. Huge congratulations and much love from all of the foundation team.' On BBC Radio Scotland series Stark Talk in 2019, Ms Benedetti spoke about having children, stating: 'My sister's married now and in a very kind of settled place in her life, but she's 35, and a lot of my friends are in similar circumstances. They live in a house with a partner and have children or are going to have children, and obviously I'm not at that point yet.' Asked in a 2022 interview with The Times if she would like to have children, she was quoted as saying: 'If I am fortunate enough to be able to, yes I hope so.'
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Nicola Benedetti: ‘Classical music is threatened by young people's lack of basic discipline'
One day last week, the violinist Nicola Benedetti was in her office, staring at spreadsheets, when her teenage step-daughter came in. 'She peered at my computer, saw me looking at budgets, and said, 'You know how you started out as a musician... well, how do you feel about this?'' Benedetti tells me, laughing. 'It was 11.30 at night. My eyes were closing, and I knew I was going to be woken up in a couple of hours by the baby. But I've always been very clear about my purpose.' Right now, Benedetti, 38, is applying that sense of purpose to the Edinburgh International Festival, her third edition since becoming its artistic director in 2022. We've met at her office, on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, a fortnight before this year's festival opens, and she is evidently flat out. In May 2024, she had her first child, a daughter, with her husband, Wynton Marsalis – a celebrated American jazz musician 25 years her senior, who also has a teenage daughter and three older sons from previous relationships. 'There's a lot going on,' she says with a wry smile. Benedetti met Marsalis when, aged 17, she travelled alone to New York for the first time, for a concert at Lincoln Center. Over subsequent years, they have performed together many times; he has even written several concertos for her, his first compositions for the violin. A few years ago, rumours started circulating that the pair were in a relationship, which, until now, Benedetti had always refused to confirm. I ask her why she's been so guarded. 'People don't come to my concerts because of who I'm in a relationship with; they come because I play the violin,' she says. 'And I tend not to discuss my private life because I don't think people find it interesting. But there are all sorts of things people could find out – it's not like I'm really secretive.' I suggest that if, in interviews, she were less coy about her marriage to Marsalis, it would at least stop nosy journalists from asking about it. 'I think it's pretty much out there now,' she says, laughing. 'I really don't care any more if people want to write about it or not. I'm certainly not trying to hide anything.' Besides, she's too busy to worry about such things. Within months of the birth, Benedetti was back at work, conducting meetings and dealing with organisational crises with her baby strapped to her chest. 'Luckily, she was asleep most of the time,' she says, 'and because I was able to physically get stuck back into work, I didn't have that [new mother] identity crisis where you wonder who you were before this other person came into the world.' Benedetti, who was born in Ayrshire, doesn't seem like the identity-crisis type. Her sustained presence in the top flight of classical music is testament not only to her precocious talent but also to exceptional resilience. At the age of eight, she was leading the National Children's Orchestra of Great Britain. By the time she was 15, she was making major career decisions for herself, quitting the Yehudi Menuhin School, in Surrey, because she wanted to focus even more intently on her playing than the school's academic schedule allowed. The following year, she won the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition and signed a £1m, six-album record deal with Universal Music. These days, she is regarded as one of Britain's greatest living violinists, second only, perhaps, to Nigel Kennedy. Her recordings of Shostakovich and Glazunov's concertos are particularly sublime. Yet Benedetti has always regarded herself less as a performer than as an evangelist for the life-changing beauty of classical music. For her, the main attraction of the festival directorship was the fact that it gave her 'the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of people with the arts'. As a result, she says, 'becoming the EIF's artistic director doesn't feel like a departure' from her violin career; rather, it's a natural continuation of her life's mission. The line-up she has assembled for this year's festival is not short on surprises, both musical and otherwise. Highlights include John Tavener's eight-hour mystical song cycle The Veil of the Temple; Figures in Extinction, a collaboration between the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater; and a new James Graham play, Make It Happen, about the role of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 2008 banking crisis, in which Succession's Brian Cox appears as the ghost of the pioneering 18th-century Scottish capitalist Adam Smith. 'Make It Happen throws a mirror back on to Scotland, so it will be interesting to see Edinburgh audiences debate that, which is exactly what the festival should be doing,' Benedetti says. She stops, as though wary of sounding worthy. 'But I promise there are plenty of other things that will be pure enjoyment from beginning to end. We're not always trying to change the world.' Although Benedetti has a reputation for steeliness, today she is warm and open. Instead of trotting out the usual box-ticking guff about diversity and accessibility, she goes off-message by telling me she thinks older concert audiences are an essential part of the classical-music ecosystem. 'I found myself quoting Tony Benn during a team meeting the other day,' she admits with a laugh. 'I reminded them that each generation tends to fight the same fights over and over again. Yes, we can get excited about being the first people to swap chairs for beanbags in the Usher Hall, probably. Yes, we can push to be the most affordable arts festival in the world, which under my watch is what we want to be. But, let's be honest, there have been promenade-style performances since medieval times; ticketing schemes for younger people are nothing new; and every single person who has run the festival before me was, in their way, trying to make it open-door. So it's good to have a bit of realism and humility about what we're doing.' All the same, few people in the arts have done more than she has to make classical music accessible. Her Benedetti Foundation, established in 2019, has worked with 100,000 people of all ages through its outreach and education programmes. She thinks listening properly to classical music for 15 minutes a day is as important for a child as reading a book, and has complained loudly about cuts to music in schools since the subject became a victim of the then coalition government's austerity policies in 2012. More than a decade since those cuts began to take hold, does she think the steady erosion of music education has had an impact on the amount of homegrown talent graduating from Britain's elite music institutions? 'In terms of numbers, probably not much; there are always people with money who will pay for the education that will put their children on that path,' she says. 'But in terms of who is getting that opportunity, yes, no question about it. 'Across the country today, those who are not from a more privileged background, who are studying an instrument to a high level at college, are often either foreign students who have come here to study, or have been supported by a charity.' However, when it comes to what she calls the 'Mark Simpsons of the world' – referring to the working-class Liverpudlian who became the first person to win both BBC Young Musician of the Year and Young Composer of the Year – 'who have shown talent aged four or five, been picked up by the local council and given free music lessons of a quality that enables them to really progress into a career in music? There is no question those numbers have been significantly depleted and impacted.' Benedetti's own upbringing was privileged. Her entrepreneurial father, who came to the UK from his native Italy at the age of 10, made millions after inventing a revolutionary cling film dispenser. Her Scottish-Italian mother made her and her older sister Stephanie (now a violinist with the group Clean Bandit) practise the violin for three hours every day during the school holidays. Recently, Benedetti has found herself questioning the way she and Stephanie were brought up. 'My daughter is only one, but my sister has two children, aged three and five, and seeing her experience has definitely made me consider our own childhood,' she says. 'But both of us have a realistic, even positive view of our upbringing. It was very strict – we feared upsetting our parents, or doing the wrong thing – but we also knew we were loved to death by our mum and dad.' Benedetti's combination of success, talent and youthful looks soon made her a magnet for attention far beyond the concert hall. By the time she was in her 20s, newspapers were running her picture alongside such suggestive headlines as 'Will Nic Air her G String?' She has also been a target for stalkers; in 2010, one broke into her London flat. But she has never seen herself as a victim of the way she was marketed in her youth, even though her early album covers certainly made the most of her sultry Italian looks. 'While the more time that goes by, the more clearly I see that, I knew what a photo looked like – I knew what I was putting on, I was not a blissfully naive 16-year-old. I was not.' And besides, she adds, 'I always had my dad saying, 'Make sure you are dressed decently.' 'The greater pressure, much more than sexism, was around the sort of music I was being encouraged to play,' she adds. Unlike the singer Charlotte Church, with whom she was sometimes lumped as two fresh faces of classical music, the young Benedetti always resisted demands that she perform 'crossover' pieces in favour of less-commercial classical repertoire. 'It's not something that is treated with nearly enough seriousness in public discourse: the power of really populist, saccharine, overly commercialised music. It's more potent than showing some cleavage, believe it or not. But even there I was in charge of my own choices. And I live by them. They were mine.' Today, she worries that the younger generation lack that toughness and are less equipped for the sacrifices required to become a world-class musician. 'The future of classical music is definitely threatened by the changes to work ethic and mentality. You cannot cheat your way through learning a musical instrument: ChatGPT is not going to teach you the violin. It's impossible to learn music on any level with AI. You cannot fake your way to becoming a musician. Yet I think young people have become used to a lack of basic discipline in their daily lives – and that really worries me.' While, as we saw recently at Wimbledon, it's not unusual now for elite young sports stars to have a psychologist in their entourage, according to Benedetti, in the upper echelons of music, the conversation around mental health remains 'very strange and hushed. You are just meant to get on with it. The psychological vulnerability of musicians is a very real thing. But on the other hand, you also have a choice about where you place your focus'. She's loath to spell it out, but it's clear that she thinks the younger generation have been encouraged to place too much focus on their mental health. 'I have definitely been through a period of time where the wellbeing industry, and I do mean industry, has captured my thoughts and made me believe that my focus needed to be turned inwards on my feelings. And it was the worst possible thing for me. I thrive when I am focused on things that are to do with other people and are for other people, such as performance. Of course, I can only speak for myself. Other people's experiences may be different. But it's a subject everyone is nervous to talk about. You can say the wrong thing and be demonised.' Having a child has made Benedetti think a lot about feelings recently. She wonders, for instance, whether it's right to leave her daughter to scream when she is upset: one school of thought in parenting argues that, instead of being distracted from their rage, screaming children need to have their emotions recognised. 'But distraction from feelings is good, too!' Talking of which, her daughter has also given Benedetti a 'renewed appreciation' for violin practice (perhaps, above all, when she is screaming?): 'There is something rather wonderful about telling your family that this is what you will be doing for the next three hours,' she says. 'Then you go into a room and it's just you, your violin, the notes on a page, and the sound.' The Edinburgh International Festival runs from Aug 1-25 at various venues across the Scottish capital. Details:
The Guardian
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tanz fever: a whirl through the Viennese festival where dance erupts across the city
Matteo Haitzmann is a violinist who has tonight swapped his strings and bow for a skipping rope. With drummer Judith Schwarz and Arthur Fussy on modular synthesiser, he has formed an unorthodox trio to deliver a show in which each stroke, beat and jump lives up the title: Make It Count. It's an hour of unusual rigour with an electrifying thrill – and the standout from my whirl through Vienna's ImPulsTanz festival, a kaleidoscopic programme of performance and participation. With the studied nonchalance of a rock star, Haitzmann stands on one of three island-like platforms, swinging what could be mistaken for a mic lead. Hanna Kritten Tangsoo's lighting design will become increasingly mercurial but right now the synth desk twinkles, beams crisscross the stage creating an anarchic A next to the drum kit and the swirling rope resembles a red flash of lightning. The surface of Haitzmann's stage becomes a drum skin and the rope's handle a substitute stick to build rhythm, each thud ushering in a sound that suggests the crack of a glacier. The musicians, wearing similar mottled outfits, pick up each other's prompts and the sound swells until you can't always identify each instrument. That's because Haitzmann is now jumping feverishly and will spend most of the performance skipping: the swish and squeak of his exercise interrupted with an occasional yelp to cue a switch in lighting. This is an incredibly disciplined piece, more so than much gig theatre, and the tempo slows for an erotically charged sequence in which the rope steadily thwacks the floor against the sultry pulse of the accompaniment. Haitzmann may look like a boxer in training but the difference is this is not an individual endeavour – he wants to get in the zone but bring everyone else in the room with him. The intensity builds, punctured by Haitzmann's occasional break for a snack or drink. A feat like this could easily come across as larky or po-faced but the design, music and movement are wholly integrated even in more delicately handled sequences, which retain an air of rehearsal experiments, where upturned cymbals are placed around the stage and struck with the rope. It all amounts to the most imaginative reframing of a music gig since KlangHaus stormed the Edinburgh fringe in 2014. Part of ImPulsTanz's young choreographers' series, called [8:tension], Make It Count is a tightrope of a show, which chimes with an observation at the start of festival veteran Joe Alegado's latest creation. 'Performing is a high-wire act,' says Alegado. 'An act of courage!' That's the kind of circus-barker spiel that more typically introduces acrobatic spectacle but his new choreography, prefaced by softly spoken reflections and a meditative projected film, is triumphantly unshowy. Alegado has been teaching workshops at ImPulsTanz since it was co-founded, 41 years ago, by Karl Regensburger (who still presides over the festival) and the late Ismael Ivo. Staged in a studio at Vienna's Arsenal, a former military complex, under the unprepossessing title Bits and Pieces, Alegado's offering captures what you could call the quality of sharing. On a barely lit stage, he begins with a graceful solo, the movement – especially the play of his fingers – often as wispy as his long grey hair. The piece ends with him pulling an imaginary thread; the next dancer arrives and resumes the motif. One soloist inspires another soloist and they then join together in a duet; three individuals are in turn activated by another and led into a quartet. A playful sequence spotlights only the twisting hands of all four in a row (Alegado is joined by Blanka Flora Csasznyi, Simona Lazurová and Katarina Vinieskova), their black costumes concealing them in darkness. Throughout are gestures of giving and receiving, inspiring and developing, each move rounding out another's idea to suggest the passing on of knowledge. In the Arsenal's warren of studios, workshops are doing just that, at all levels, with public classes ranging from dancehall to Limón technique, watched by anyone who chooses to linger. (The festival's Public Moves programme has a series of open-air stages across the city for people to take part, too.) Alegado's array of pieces have a similar openness; the voiceover, though portentous, discusses the challenge of being fully present on stage and in achieving timelessness in your work. That is done through the most minimal of means here; a simple caress or a glance are not nothing, the pieces suggest – they can prove long-lasting. In these fragments, Alegado evokes a stillness, no matter how busy the movement or the accompaniment, which at one point consists of a cacophonous layered looping of breath work. When the 45 minutes are up, the parting gesture is of thread being wound up, ready for the next time. Bits and Pieces could just as easily provide an alternative title for the [8:tension] show Poor Guy, performed at the Schauspielhaus by Luigi Guerrieri, not least because he is fully naked throughout, save for jewellery from both the 'Gypsy and non-Gypsy' sides of his family. Guerrieri explores how and when the sharing of personal trauma tips into narcissism or is met with kudos – whether it's done on or off stage (and perhaps especially online, where the work originated). 'I'm tired of myself,' he says, stretching out several octaves in that final word with look-at-me glee. In these vignettes, the distinction between memoir and sketch can be unclear: was little Luigi really delivered by a firefighter, and made the fire department's mascot? Amid the occasional dead-end routine, it's certainly moving and very funny; Guerrieri has a sophisticated understanding of how humour can not just temper but elucidate the pain in his story. There is also some innovative vocal delivery from our wildly charismatic host despite a viral infection that has limited his range tonight. He begins by massaging his nipples, as if milking his story for all it is worth. A family history of violence and instability emerges but he upends expectations of autobiographies, particularly 'misery memoirs', and unsettles the transaction between performer and audience, roaming the crowd and flattering us individually to seek our approval. If we pity Guerrieri, the show asks, does it empower him or us? Against the same exposed brickwork of this stage, Greek choreographer Lenio Kaklea starts her double bill with Alegado-esque projections of dancing hands, fluttering like shadow puppet birds in her film An Alphabet for the Camera. Kaklea frames parts of her body using her fingers as a substitute viewfinder, before widening the lens to show her performing as a tiny figure lost in vast landscapes both natural and industrial (her silver coat merging into the greyscale of a warehouse). In such an environment, how do you express yourself? Kaklea uses Madonna's 80s hit of that name in the second piece, Untitled (Figures), performed on stage after an audio recording of Lesbian Nation author Jill Johnston. Kaklea has tremendous presence and first appears in bra and fishnets, responding to Madonna's call to arms with finger clicks, smooth hips, coy glances, disco rolls and salsa shimmies before she struts down a chalked-out catwalk. But when the song is done, she deflates in a daze of confusion. It triggers a bid to express what she's got – but on her own terms. Off come the bra and tights, on go side-buttoned jeans, boots and western hat but the techno score eventually leaves her on her back as if thrown from a horse. Changing into a pale pink leotard, she shifts through a series of seated poses, maximising eye contact with the audience. A balletic sequence is then given a rodeo-rider swagger; her dissatisfaction returns, her poses now like a doll contorted into awkward positions. Next comes a nautical costume – a nod, perhaps, to another of her queer idols, the artist Yannis Tsarouchis. The show loses focus with her beguiling transformation as a lounge lizard, prowling around the audience with her tongue darting, but you're left with the sense of a series of portraits in which Kaklea has searched for her own reflection. In contrast to Guerrieri and Kaklea's introspective solo pieces is the frenetic ensemble of Delirious Night, choreographed by Mette Ingvartsen, at the Akademietheater. It takes inspiration from the 'dance epidemic' recorded in Strasbourg over several weeks in 1518, when people were gripped by a mania to keep dancing – some of them right until death. The hysteria is captured in a banner on stage: 'Attitudes Passionelles.' But the febrile atmosphere that Ingvartsen captures is of our own Covid era: that strange combination of collective unity and fear, dissociation and division, the rumble of protest and the potential to rebuild. The stage fills with bodies seeking connection, the mood somewhere between campfire shindig and unruly protest. 'How can I resist? I want to resist,' runs one refrain. The dancers wear masks – Halloween ones, wrestling ones, beastly ones akin to Chewbacca – and many of them are topless, beating out rhythms on their bodies. There is no ringleader here, the paths pursued are freestyle and only occasionally do some of the nine performers fall into step. Ingvartsen captures that feeling of being out late, passing revellers, unsure whether they'll prove to be jubilant or malevolent. Drummer Will Guthrie drives the piece with his own feverish score, the movement becoming more jagged and incantatory, and some of the dancers seem to visibly age as they wearily group together and question how they can go on. You begin to feel the same as the vibe reaches an end-of-the-night directionless state, the hangover seemingly arriving even before sleep. Ingvartsen set out to record 'what living in times of crisis does to our bodies' and the result is both adrenalised and bleak, if never as precisely delivered as Make It Count. Ingvartsen's dancers are seeking a release, a transformative state, like Haitzmann jumping rope. Or, in less extreme ways, like so many taking part in the open air classes around town at a festival that favours night owls with its 11pm show times and after-hours parties. Crossing the Danube late one evening, I spy a makeshift stage full of couples swaying right by the water. Here is a city that never sleeps – because it just keeps dancing. ImPulsTanz: Vienna international dance festival runs until 10 August. Chris Wiegand's accommodation was provided by the festival.
CTV News
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Orléans young violinist wins $25K music prize
Justin Saulnier, 20, plays the violin before a performance at the Carleton-Dominion Chalmers Centre in Ottawa on Sunday, July 20, 2025. (Camille Wilson/CTV News Ottawa) Ottawa's Justin Saulnier, a 20-year-old violinist, has reached the highest level of national recognition by winning a prestigious music award. Saulnier received the Michael Measures First Prize reward of $25,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts. The rising star made his orchestral debut at 12-years-old with the Ottawa Chamber Orchestra. He's performed with major orchestras across Canada, including the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the National Arts Centre, and won multiple national competitions. He currently studies at McGill University with violinist Andrew Wan. Saulnier will perform as a featured soloist with 91 of Canada's top young musicians at the National Youth Orchestra of Canada on Sunday evening at the Carleton-Dominion Chalmers Centre. This story will be updated
The Guardian
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Just Biber album review – Podger rises brilliantly to these sonatas' extreme challenges
Ten years ago, Rachel Podger made a fine recording of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber's Rosary Sonatas for solo violin and continuo, each of which portrays an episode in the life of Christ. Now she adds a disc of more sonatas by arguably the most important baroque composer for the violin after JS Bach – five of the collection of eight that Biber published in 1681, as well as the quasi-theatrical Sonata Representivo, which may or may not have been composed by Biber and probably dates from 1669. The pieces are all characterised by their extreme technical difficulty, and especially by their extensive use of scordatura, when individual violin strings are tuned differently from usual. Podger copes with all these challenges quite brilliantly, including imitating the sounds of animals in the Sonata Representivo; she brings an expressive freedom that never takes too many liberties, but remains true to the spirit of the music. If the works themselves are not quite as startling and vivid as the Rosary Sonatas, anyone who enjoyed Podger's previous encounter with Biber will surely relish this one, too. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
