Antje Weithaas

There are very few violinists who can communicate with their instruments as expressively and with such versatility as Antje Weithaas. True to her belief that you have to master your instrument in the same way as you do your own voice, she always manages to hit just the right note with her audience. For every composer and every work, she finds the right tone, phrasing and rhetoric, with the finest nuances of timbre and dynamic. In this programme, which features great works from the solo violin canon, Weithaas will surprise you time and time again with her vigorous, profound playing. Just like the Cello Suites, the three Partitas and three Sonatas for solo violin are amongst the masterpieces that Bach wrote in Köthen. He composed them as finger exercises for his pupils and for himself - Bach was himself an excellent violinist - and for well-known violin virtuosos of the period like Johann Georg Pisendel. With regard to technical complexity and expression, Bach went further than anything that had previously been written for violin. When, in 1923, Eugène Ysaÿe heard the violin legend Joseph Szigeti playing Bach's Sonatas and Partitas, he conceived the notion of composing a cycle of the same magnitude. Bach was a model for his work in various different ways. In the Second Sonata, Ysaÿe quotes note by note from Bach's Prelude to the Third Partita.