This concert took place on Sunday 27 September 2026 at St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, London SW7 4RL.
A recital by exceptional young musicians in the spirit of Yehudi Menuhin.
Justin Peng · Francis Bodis, violin
Xiaowen Shang, piano
Sunday 27 September 2026, 3.30pm – 5.00pm
St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, London SW7 4RL
Free admission · Voluntary donations welcome
The programme is deliberately wide. Bach asks one player to build counterpoint and structure on a single instrument, unaccompanied. Paganini pushes technique to its limit and then requires that technique to serve line and imagination. Spohr writes for the salon. Saint-Saëns, rewritten by Ysaÿe, turns a piano étude into something denser and quicker to react. Igudesman is writing in our own decade, and expects the player to have a sense of humour.
After the interval the scale changes. The Mendelssohn concerto is the other half of a violinist’s education: not one player alone in a church, but a soloist carrying a single argument from the first bar to the last.
This is not a display concert. What makes it worth the afternoon is how differently the same instrument behaves in different hands — how four strings can be made to sound architectural, theatrical, entirely private, or very close to out of control.
For two young players the task is therefore not only to play the works well, but to find a position inside a tradition. Maturity, at this stage, rarely arrives as a bigger sound or a faster finger. It arrives as a sense of when to hold back and when to take the risk; of how to give a phrase direction; of how to let silence do some of the work.
Programme
PART I
Francis Bodis · violin
Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908)
Introduction and Tarantella, Op. 43
Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840)
Caprice No. 18 in C major, Op. 1
Corrente – Allegro
Justin Peng · violin
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
Sonata No. 1 in G minor for solo violin, BWV 1001
I. Adagio · II. Fuga
Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840)
Caprice No. 24 in A minor, Op. 1
Louis Spohr (1784–1859)
Scherzo, Op. 135 No. 2
from Six Salon Pieces, Op. 135
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de valse, Op. 52 No. 6
arr. Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931)
Aleksey Igudesman (b. 1973)
Applemania
INTERVAL
PART II
Justin Peng · violin
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
I. Allegro molto appassionato · II. Andante · III. Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace
Piano — Xiaowen Shang.
Running time
The concert ran from 3.30pm to 5.00pm, in two parts with an interval.
Admission
Admission was free and no ticket was needed.
Voluntary donations are welcome at the door. They go towards the cost of presenting Inchwise Music’s concerts and are received by Inchwise Edtech Ltd — they are not a collection for St Stephen’s Church.
St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, London SW7 4RL — nearest station Gloucester Road (District, Circle and Piccadilly lines).
