Over the last decade Elizabeth Wallfisch has become a leading advocate of the eighteenth-century Italian violin repertory through a series of ground-breaking recordings of music by Corelli, Vivadi, Veracini, Locatelli, Tartini and others on the Hyperion label. She makes a welcome return to the Suffolk Villages Festival with two young colleagues in a programme that ranges from Corelli’s famous ‘La Folia’ variations, his op.5, no.12 of 1700, to Thomas Linley junior’s virtuosic A major sonata, written while he was studying in Florence with Pietro Nardini in the late 1760s.

The programme also includes Pietro Locatelli’s extravagant op.6 no.6 sonata of 1737, Francesco Veracini’s extraordinary op.2, no.12 of 1744, a set of variations on two seventeenth-century Italian ground basses, and Tartini’s famous ‘Devil’s Trill’ sonata, supposedly inspired by a dream in which the composer witnessed the Devil playing the violin at the end of his bed! There will also be harpsichord music by the Scarlattis, father and son: variations on ‘La Folia’ by Alessandro and sonatas by Domenico.