Discovering Bach in Hereford - Holy Trinity Church

Zoë Beyers is one of the finest violinists of her generation and for this programme Zoë will be joined by members the orchestra she leads, the ESO, in the stunning acoustics of the Holy Trinity Church to illuminate some of Bach’s finest works for violin.

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos were effectively written as an instrumental job application for the German aristocracy but unfortunately these iconic works were unlikely to have been performed during his lifetime. They were later discovered in the Brandenburg archives almost 100 years after Bach’s death and they remain some of the finest examples of instrumental music of the Baroque canon.

Bach was renowned as a virtuoso keyboard player, but he was also a highly skilled violinist and wrote a considerable number of masterpieces for the instrument, including eight sonatas for violin and harpsichord, six works for unaccompanied violin and it appears as a soloist in most of his Brandenburg Concertos, including Nos.4 and 5.

Bach’s love for both the harpsichord and violin is also evident in his Violin Concertos which he later transcribed into Harpsichord Concertos (self-plagiarism is commonplace in composer circles) and his Violin Concerto in E Major has remained one of his most popular and regularly performed to this day.