Joshua Bell To Tour With The Academy Of St Martin In The Fields
Led by virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields will tour Australia in April 2017, their first Australian tour in nearly three decades.
Bell will lead the Academy players in two concerts with two separate programs.
Program One in Sydney on April 22 features Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the slow movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto providing a lyrical showcase for Bell and the Academy’s strings.
Program Two on April 23 opens with Mozart’s stormy Symphony No.25 heard in the opening moments of Amadeus, followed by Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto – a bravura display of swagger and elegance for soloist Joshua Bell. The highlight of this program is Beethoven’s Third Symphony.
Established in 1958 by the late Sir Neville Marriner, the orchestra is maned after the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, where the Academy gave its first performance.
In the decades since, the Academy has become one of the world’s most revered and recorded chamber orchestras – familiar to music-lovers everywhere for their classic recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the soundtrack of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus.
Joshua Bell, one of the most celebrated violinists of his era, became the Academy’s Music Director in 2011, leading the orchestra from the first violin and performing as a soloist.
A native of Bloomington Indiana, Bell made his orchestral debut aged 14 with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was an incognito performance in a Washington DC subway station in 2007, however, that transformed his reputation from musician’s musician to household name.
