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.