Bite-Sized Baroque 2016

Over the last few years our lunchtime concert series has gradually changed to become an exploration of a composer, an instrument, or a genre.  We've had some well-known composers and repertoire (Bach cello suites and violin partitas/sonatas, Beethoven and Schubert lieder) along with some less obvious pieces (songs by Nadia and Lili Boulanger, a rarely performed song cycle by Richard Strauss).

This year, the series is split between two composers who were incredibly creative and inventive.  Both were virtuoso players in their own rights, and both used compositional techniques which modern day composers often regard as being new, ground breaking approaches.

We'll be in a new venue as well - the lovely St Simon's Church, on Partick Bridge Street (cross Dumbarton Road at the bottom of Byres Road, and walk passed the Three Judges pub...), which has a cracking acoustic and is perfect for these pieces.

The West End's own Concerto Caledonia are the hosts for this series (who else?!), which runs from Monday 6th until Friday 17th June, each weekday at 1.10pm.

For Week One they're joined by the phenomenal Bojan Cicic to explore Heinrich Biber's Mysteries of the Rosary - a set of 15 violin sonatas and a passacaglia, which use different tunings for the violin and are seen as a bit of a mountain for any violinist to climb!

Bojan's thoughts on the week ahead...

As I boarded the train this morning, bringing me to Glasgow and the start of our rehearsals for the concerts next week, I realised that I'm embarking on a project that has been at the back of my mind since my student days at the Zagreb Academy of Music. Around that time I came across a recording of Biber's Rosary Sonatas by Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antique Koln and this new 17th century language spoke to me in such a way that I became an obsessive listener of both this recording and many others, exploring this little known repertoire to me.

Over the years I came back to these sonatas, performing them on separate occasions, but never as a whole. How funny that it took me almost two decades to perform them in their entirety. Even though my student days seem so long ago, the sense of excitement in discovering Biber's sound world, which Alison, David, Alex and I are about to present in Glasgow, never left me. I hope that the music we make in the next few days will be as exhilarating to the audience and will speak to them as directly as it did to me all those years ago.

The concerts are free to come along to - no ticket required.