Article published in Manchester Evening News 18 September 2015

NICOLA BENEDETTI has moved from precociously brilliant violin soloist – winning the BBC Young Musician competition 11 years ago, aged 16 – through pin-up recording star, to national treasure. She was made an MBE in 2013, is known for her commitment to educational and charity work, and always in demand as a concert soloist.

This month, though, she’s embarking on something new: a concert tour titled Italy And The Four Seasons, featuring her own group of musicians playing Vivaldi’s best-known work, plus the sextet version of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir De Florence, and world premiere performances of a piece written by Mark-Anthony Turnage for her and her partner, cellist Leonard Elschenbroich.

It comes to the Bridgewater Hall on September 22.

“I put the programme together,” she says. “It wasn’t one that required any rocket science – it’s inspired by Italy, and Mark-Anthony’s piece has Italy in mind, too.” Her parents, Giovanni and Francesca, are the source of her Italian heritage, although she was born in West Kilbride, brought up in Scotland and still talks like a Scots lassie.

“Vivaldi has been a growing presence in my life in the past couple of years,” she says. “I’ve been working with the Italian musician Andrea Marcon (the founder of the Venice Baroque Orchestra), and I’ve developed a completely different way of interpreting Vivaldi’s personality, his character and his music.”

We heard some of the fruit of that in Manchester a year ago, when she was soloist for The Four Seasons in Manchester Camerata’s concert. She was using a baroque bow and playing on gut strings, in the finest performance of the piece I’d heard for several years.

“This time the musicians and I will be spending a lot of time in rehearsal and I’ll be devising a very personal interpretation of the music,” she says. “I’ll have a free rein to mould things exactly as I like.”

There’s more Vivaldi on the programme, too (his Grosso Mogul in D), and the new piece by Turnage is called Duetti D’Amore (Love Duets). “It was written for Leonard and me, and inspired by our relationship and what Mark-Anthony knows about us.

“It’s a suite, really, in five movements, and it works on a number of different levels.”

Nicola has already recorded Italian music on CD, and showed her Scottish roots in an album last summer (called Homecoming). The next is Shostakovich and Glazunov concertos – due early in 2016.