I am looking forward to my concert with The Oxford Sinfonia which will take place at 7.30pm on Saturday 30 March in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford. Jan Schmolck will be the soloist in Brahms’ Violin Concerto and to balance this great work we will start the concert with Brahms’ St Anthony Variations, a work that I have long wished to conduct.

In addition, the orchestra and I will be proud to present Judith Weir’s Heroic Strokes of the Bow, written for the Westdeutsche Sinfonie in 1991-2 and now widely performed by orchestras the world over. This work was inspired by the Paul Klee painting which is now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Paul Klee was himself an excellent violin player and played professionally in Berne’ Municipal Orchestra. Weir writes: “My personal obesrvation is that perhaps Klee himself was influenced in some of his work by the visual imagery of musical notation with which he was so familiar. To a musican’s eye, Klee’s geometrical shapes and regularly repeated simple patterns seem to release information directly into the mind; looking at a Klee painting feels like reading music”.

 

Judith Weir

Jan Schmolck

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