NEWTON Abbot’s Courtenay Centre will host the final concert of the Nadsa season on Friday, April 11.

Belgian soloists Jolente De Maeyer (violin) and Nikolaas Kende (piano) will perform. Theirs is a 20 year musical partnership bringing an outstanding performance of variety and depth.

Acclaimed prize-winners and leading Belgian soloists, the duo have toured extensively in the USA, China, South Africa, and Europe.

Known for their 'symbiotic playing', 'pervasive lyricism', and 'powerful yet poetic playing', they are recognised as one of the leading musical duos in Europe. Both are professors at conservatories in Belgium and the Netherlands and have given masterclasses worldwide.

Jolente and Nikolaas have chosen to journey through the rich landscape of three centuries of Austro-German repertoire and communicate the profound beauty that these musical masterpieces offer.

Three of the composers are very well-known - J S Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - and the virtuosic violinist-composer, Fritz Kreisler, was one of the most noted violin masters of his day. Lera Auerbach, however, is different: hers is not a name that springs readily to mind. It deserves to.

Lera Auerbach is a contemporary Soviet-born 21st-century Austrian-American composer. Born in 1971, she has composed songs, chorales, piano trios, sonatas, concertos, operas, preludes and symphonies.

Her Twenty-four Preludes rivet the listener with ‘strokes of brutal boldness and sudden, subtle moments of ghostly quietude’. The two that Jolente and Nikolaas have chosen will certainly do that; they leave one haunted, almost mesmerised, and wanting to hear more.

What a contrast she will be after the Bach! His sonata for violin and piano in C minor BWV 1017, with its Siciliano, adagio and allegro, starts with a melancholic almost lamenting melody, and finishes with a dancing fugue.

Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor, Op. 30, No. 2 (April 1802) was composed in a year of utter despair: his hearing had deteriorated significantly and he was resting under doctor’s orders.

He wrote an anguished letter to his brother, and then, within a matter of weeks, he’d written these three violin sonatas. 'I would have ended my life', Beethoven had written in his Testament; 'It was only my art that held me back.' Few works remind us more bracingly that when Beethoven said that he lived for music, he meant it.

Brahms composed many works in Hofstetten during the fruitful summer months of 1886. His Violin Sonata in D minor, Op 108 was the fourth. Starting in a mysterious, agitated and brooding manner, its two middle movements are on a comparatively small scale. The final movement is almost orchestral in stature.

Jolente and Nikolaas will finish their recital with two bitter-sweet dances by Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962): his Liebesleid/Liebesfreud (Love’s Sorrow/Love’s Joy) will transport their listeners to old Vienna.

This Nadsa concerts recital is being sponsored by The C & M Pike Trust.

Tickets for the 7.30pm concert on April 11 must be bought in advance online www.nadsa.co.uk or, failing that, at 01626 717730 (09:00 – 17:00).