After English music and music history achieved European significance in the form of Henry Purcell at the end of the 17th century, the island's musical art was strangely silent for more than 200 years. Even though the first major opera and soon concert ventures soon took root in early capitalist London, the programmes remained dominated by protagonists and composers from across the Channel: from George Frideric Handel to Carl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christan Bach to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Antonín Dvořák, to whom the great concert halls and festivals of the 19th century were open. With important commissioned works in their luggage, they occupied central places in a music scene that hardly expressed itself compositionally, even at an international level. This only changed with the emergence of Edward Elgar, then a whole generation of important composers such as Arnold Bax, Arthur Bliss, Frank Bridge, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and William Walton - and finally Benjamin Britten, who is often referred to as the modern ‘Orpheus Britannicus’. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams was one of the British composers who were still characterised by the late Victorian era at the end of the 19th century. Initially working as an organist in London, he turned to collecting and publishing folk songs as early as 1900 - an activity that left its mark on his creative biography just as much as the rediscovery of music from the Tudor period, the English Renaissance, which only became known to a wider circle of scholars, musicians and composers years later and from which Vaughan Williams drew inspiration for a new, but old-fashioned form of expression. An example of this is one of his best-known works today, the ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, composed in 1910, with an underlying musical movement from the mid-16th century and a modal harmony derived from it. Combined with the wide-ranging sound of a divided string orchestra (and an additional solo string quartet), the score represented something hitherto unheard of, whose dense, almost mystical atmosphere also generated a spiritual intensity.

Exactly 40 years later, the 78-year-old Vaughan Williams also divided the orchestra into several groups in one of his older works, the Concerto grosso for strings - not for reasons of sound, however, but quite pragmatically for technical and instrumental pedagogical reasons: It was a work for the Rural Music Schools Association of the time, which was to be premiered in the Royal Albert Hall by over 400 pupils with very different abilities. Accordingly, there is a demanding ‘Concertino’ for the advanced players, a ‘Tutti’ in which the young players are only required to play the third position and simple double stops - and a further tutti group to be added ad libitum, which also provides a part for the absolute ‘beginners’ that can only be played on open strings and therefore cannot spoil the intonation. Vaughan Williams also chose the key of D major, whose harmonic keynotes (D, A, E as well as G and C) can be realised on the open strings of the strings. The division of the orchestra also suggests a reference to the Baroque form of the concerto grosso - although the term rather than the associated forms have been adopted here. Rather, it is a suite with stylised (dance) movements, at the end of which the introductory Intrada returns.

Even as a teenager, Benjamin Britten came into contact with tendencies and influences that went far beyond the Romantic style of late Victorian influence that prevailed after the First World War and whose most influential representatives were Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford. Britten's private composition lessons with Frank Bridge (1879-1941) were decisive for his enduring curiosity and his open view beyond the cultural borders of the British Isles: This not only familiarised him with the music of the Second Viennese School, but also gave him access to Bartók and Scriabin. This made his studies at the Royal College of Music in London with John Ireland (a student of Stanford), which began in 1930, all the more disappointing for Britten, who made little progress in his compositional development - Britten was only able to perfect his skills on the piano and viola. 

Britten was all the more impressed by the performance of Alban Berg's opera ‘Wozzeck’ broadcast on the radio on 14 March 1934, in which Sir Adrian Boult conducted the BBC Orchestra - and which Berg himself was able to attend at Wörthersee in Austria. However, the hoped-for personal encounter did not materialise when Britten spent October and November in Paris, Basel, Munich, Salzburg and finally Vienna on a travelling scholarship. The first highlights of his young compositional output were the ‘Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge’ op. 10 for string orchestra, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1937, and the Piano Concerto op. 13 (1938), in the premiere of which Britten himself took the solo part.

In view of this development, it is surprising that Britten emigrated to North America in May 1938 together with his future partner, the tenor Peter Pears. This move was apparently the result of a number of circumstances that were not only personal and artistic, but also related to the political situation in Europe: just a few weeks earlier, Adolf Hitler had created a situation with the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria in March, but above all with the invasion of Czechoslovakia that immediately followed, which invalidated the so-called Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938; the war-avoiding policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had previously reached its climax with this agreement. But the death of his mother in 1937, which had deeply shaken Britten, and the ongoing criticism of his work also suggested a new beginning in the New World. However, his artistic individuality was still not recognised on the other side of the Atlantic - a fate that Britten shared with many composers and musicians who had fled Germany in those years. The musical integration of American folklore from many different ethnic groups was also not really successful, and with the failure of the operetta ‘Paul Bunyan’ (1941) at the latest, his high hopes turned to disillusionment and homesickness. On 16 March 1942, Britten finally noted ‘The end of the week-end’ in Elizabeth Mayer's guest book - referring to a weekend that had lasted almost three years and ended on 17 April with the return to Great Britain and the landing in Liverpool. 

Of great importance for Britten as a composer, but also for our understanding of the extent to which music can reflect contemporary events, is the Violin Concerto, which was written in the internationally tense months immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War. As early as 16 June, Britten told his publisher Ralph Hawkes: ‘It is without question my best piece. I'm afraid it's quite serious.’ And on 29 September 1939, in a letter to the German conductor and pianist Hermann Scherchen, who was living in exile in Switzerland (the violin concerto had already been completed at this point), he wrote: ‘In times like these, work is so important - that people can think of other things than blowing each other up!’ 

It is therefore no coincidence that the timpani play a clearly perceptible role in the opening movement, not only at the beginning but also throughout the rest of the work - clearly more than just an allusion to Beethoven's Violin Concerto op. 61 from the no less decisive year 1806, when Emperor Franz II declared the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation extinct after almost 1000 years, King Friedrich Wilhelm III declared war on France, the Prussian state collapsed and Napoleon marched into Berlin. In fact, the movement can be interpreted in the broadest sense as an exploration of the violin repertoire up to the then current works by Stravinsky and Berg. The following Scherzo is reminiscent of a dance of death (also in contrast to the preceding calmer tempo). With the finale, entitled Passacaglia, Britten draws on a formal model from the 17th and 18th centuries, in which a frequently repeated, melodically moulded bass model forms the stable basis for ever new figures and characters - until the solo violin breaks away from it in a plaintive song at the end...

Die niederländische Geigerin Noa Wildschut hat mit ihren 23 Jahren bereits einen festen Platz in der internationalen klassischen Musikszene eingenommen. Sie wird regelmäßig zu Festivals, Solo-Recitals und Auftritten mit Orchestern im In- und Ausland eingeladen. Sie musiziert mit inspirierenden Musikern wie Janine Jansen, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Daniel Müller-Schott, Pablo Ferrández, Amihai Grosz, Kian Soltani, Nils Mönkemeyer, Igor Levit, Enrico Pace, Arthur und Lucas Jussen sowie mit ihrer Duo-Partnerin, der Pianistin Elisabeth Brauß.

Noa Wildschut trat außerdem nicht nur mit den führenden niederländischen Orchestern auf, sondern auch mit dem Tonhalleorchester Zürich, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic und der Kremerata Baltica. Weitere Einladungen führten sie nach Argentinien, Brasilien und Ecuador. Dabei arbeitete sie mit namhaften Dirigentinnen und Dirigenten zusammen wie Manfred Honeck, James Gaffigan, Michael Sanderling, Vasily Petrenko, Anja Bihlmaier, Nicholas Collon, Elim Chan, Patrick Hahn, Matthias Pintscher, Fabien Gabel und Ariel Zuckermann.

Noa Wildschut begann ihren Violinunterricht im Alter von vier Jahren, von 2013 bis 2018 studierte sie bei Vera Beths an der Musikhochschule Amsterdam, anschließend bei Antje Weithaas an der Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin. Zusätzlich zu den regulären Kursen besuchte Noa Meisterkurse und Unterricht bei Janine Jansen, Ivry Gitlis, Jaap van Zweden, Frank Peter Zimmermann, dem Pianisten Menahem Pressler und dem Cellisten Anner Bijlsma. Vom 2014 bis 2019 war die Geigerin Mitglied der „Mutter Virtuosi” unter der Leitung von Anne-Sophie Mutter sowie Stipendiatin der Anne-Sophie Mutter Stiftung. Noa Wildschut spielt eine Geige von Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, bekannt als „Lady Stretton“, von 1729 als Leihgabe der Stretton Society.

Aus der Tiefe der Holzbläsergruppe auf dem Weg nach oben – wir fahren Aufzug mit Solo-Englischhornistin Iria Folgado und Alexander Kasper, dessen komplette Dienstbezeichnung „Zweites Fagott mit Verpflichtung zum Kontrafagott“ lautet. Und erfahren, dass tiefe Holzbläser ganz unterschiedliche Charakteristika auszeichnen.