Franz Clement was the first soloist to perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto – ‘nature and art vie with each other in making [Clement] a great artist’, wrote Beethoven. Clement was a Viennese-born virtuoso who composed his own influential violin concerto and a sequence of challenging works for solo violin. The Twelve Caprices were composed on the cusp of the Classical and Romantic eras and offer a lexicon of technical demands but also suave lyricism and imaginative writing. Clement brings his own wit and flair to the themes and variations on popular stage works of the time, which are interspersed throughout the programme.

Haoli Lin was the youngest winner of the China National Violin Competition in 2008, at the age of 17, and the winner of the Andrews University International Violin Concert in 2013. He has performed in prestigious concert halls throughout China, Southeast Asia and the US and was chosen as the recipient of the Young Artist Career Grant from the Rachel Elizabeth Barton-Pine Foundation and the Starling Strings Foundation awards.

His Naxos recording of Robert and Clara Schumann is on 8579067 and was praised in American Record Guide: ‘Haoli Lin has a relaxed, warm, Central European manner that suites this music well’.