Haydn & Mozart Concertos

Tomo Keller,   violin & director
James Burk,   clarinet

This concert from the Academy of St Martin in the Fields starts and ends with two hugely popular concertos, featuring soloists from the world-renowned chamber orchestra.

The Academy’s leader, Tomo Keller, performs Haydn’s Violin Concerto in C Major – the best-known of three surviving violin concertos Haydn wrote during the period 1765-70 for virtuoso violinist Luigi Tomasini, a violinist who was employed, like the composer, by the Esterházy family. From 1757 Tomasini had led the court orchestra and it is likely that the two musicians collaborated to a certain extent on the concertos.

The concertos are interspersed by the final movement from Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches.  Written in 1944, Sea Sketches for string orchestra is an evocative description of the moods of the sea and is one of her most popular works.

Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major was also written for a specific musician; Anton Stadler, a virtuoso clarinettist and close friend of Mozart. Mozart achieved an exalted level of perfection unmatched by any other composer, conveying the most profound emotions via the simplest of means. The Clarinet Concerto, performed by the Academy’s Principal, James Burke, is unshowy and features an ease of expression that is a hallmark of all Mozart’s late works

“Music-making of the highest order.” The Guardian

 “Playing like this is rarely encountered these days” Classical Source

“The performance had all the ASMF’s hallmarks: tightness of ensemble, transparency of textures and plenty of rhythmic bounce.” Nottingham Post