Carolin Widmann

A violin, an interpreter – and nothing else? Carolin Widmann takes on the challenge of a solo violin concert evening at Musikfest 2013: without a pianist, without an orchestra and conductor. Instead, she has armed herself with a very sophisticated programme indeed.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach once wrote about his father’s Compositions for Violin Solo that there was “nothing more perfect for learning to be a good violinist.” And at the beginning of the 19th century Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, could only think that, based on the exorbitantly technical difficulties they posed, they could only be study works that enabled “a keen pupil to become a master of his instrument”. Only a good one hundred years later did Bach’s Compositions for Violin Solo become firmly established in concert repertoires – and quite rightly so, since they pose a unique compendium of virtuoso violin techniques.

Taking advantage of the compository means of the 20th century, Bernd Alois Zimmermann traced the violin’s manifold forms of expression three hundred years after Bach. And in her concert programme Carolin Widmann has also included a further work for violin solo from the still infant 21st century: “de terrae fine” by Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas.

Three composers, a violinist and a strong programme: the evening promises to be somewhat of a sensation.