For the first time in nearly 30 years, Sir Neville Marriner’s chamber orchestra will tour nationally in 2017.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields will tour Australia in April 2017, performing at Melbourne Recital Centre, the Sydney Opera House and Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), Brisbane. Celebrated violinist Joshua Bell, the Academy’s Music Director since 2011, will lead the influential English chamber orchestra in its first tour Down Under in nearly three decades.
Joshua Bell with Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Photo by Ian Douglas
Founded by the late Sir Neville Marriner, who died in October aged 92 and was expected to have led the tour, the Academy takes its name from the church in London’s Trafalgar Square, where it gave its first performance in 1959.
In the decades since, the Academy has become one of the world’s most revered and most recorded chamber orchestras in the world, with an extensive discography that includes their classic recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the soundtrack to Miloš Forman’s Academy Award-winning film Amadeus.
Bell, who leads the orchestra from the first violin and performs as a soloist, said: “I am delighted to be returning to Australia – it is always a joy to perform for Australian audiences, who are always so welcoming. This tour will be a special one for me, as it will be in my role as Music Director of the brilliant Academy of St Martin in the Fields. We are all looking forward to our visit in April, and sharing some beautiful music with the wonderful Australian audience.”
A native of Bloomington Indiana, Bell made his orchestral debut aged 14 with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, it was an incognito performance in a Washington DC subway station in 2007 that transformed his reputation from musician’s musician to household name.
Joshua Bell. Photo by Eric Kabik
Bell will lead the Academy players in two concerts in each city with two different programs, catering to both aficionados and those who are new to classical music. Programme One in Sydney and Melbourne features Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, featuring Bell’s iconic performance of this pinnacle of the Romantic repertoire. The slow movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto then provides a lyrical showcase for Bell and the Academy’s strings. Brisbane audiences have a different Programme One in which Bell performs Bruch’s Violin Concerto No 1 in G Minor, a much-loved masterwork demonstrating his stunning vivacity and power.
Programme Two (all states) opens with Mozart’s darkly stormy and operatic Symphony No 25 heard in the opening moments of Amadeus, and also includes Mozart’s dramatic Fourth Violin Concerto as well as Beethoven’s revolutionary Third Symphony.
“We very much look forward to next year’s return of Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Joshua Bell to our Concert Hall, after sell out Australian exclusive performances here in 2010,” said QPAC Chief Executive John Kotzas.
Marshall McGuire, Director of Artistic Planning at Melbourne Recital Centre, and Sydney Opera House Director, Performing Arts, Timothy Calnin also welcomed the tour, with Calnin anticipating “two spellbinding and riveting evenings with this ensemble of master musicians led by one of the greatest violinists of our time.”
Academy of St Martin in the Fields plays at Melbourne Recital Centre on April 19 & 20, Sydney Opera House on April 22 & 23, and Queensland Performing Arts Centre on April 26 & 27.
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