VIOLINIST Kristian Winther is known to Canberra music lovers as one of our brightest stars.

Born into Canberra musical royalty, his father, the late Danish pianist John Winther, was a former director of Canberra (now ANU) School of Music and his mother, Vivienne Winther, director of the Macquarie Conservatorium in Dubbo, was a former Canberra Artist of the Year and director of the chamber opera company Stopera.

It’s no surprise, then, that Kristian has become an internationally recognised violinist who has, in his own country, appeared with the Melbourne, Sydney, Tasmanian, Adelaide and WA symphony orchestras, the Auckland Philharmonic, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and many chamber ensembles.

Now he’s appearing with Germany’s Signum Saxophone Quartet, billed as “four saxophonists who rock the house”, here soon for Musica Viva performing a program billed as “jaunty”. No stranger to Musica Viva, having played for them when he worked with the Tinalley String Quartet, this is his first time with them as a soloist.

When I catch up with Kristian by phone to Sydney, he tells me, “covid was really great” – in the musical sense, that is.

There were far worse places to be stuck in during the pandemic than Australia, he relates as he and his partner, another Australian violinist whom he met while she was studying in Cologne, found themselves in Australia at the time and couldn’t have been happier to be back home. 

A friend in Cologne is packing up their stuff to send back, but they’re also looking forward to being up and away on tour soon and will be off to Finland in January. 

The coming concert has been billed as a moody, glamorous tour with an unmistakable jazz flavour but Kristian is quick to assert that “I am in no way a jazz musician”.

It’s the pairing with Signum’s sax that has people thinking it might be jazz, as the quartet, made up of Blaž Kemperle, Hayrapet Arakelyan, Alan Lužar and Guerino Bellarosa, is famous for taking weird pieces and giving them another chance. But some are not so weird, such as Bach, played in a surprising way and Goldberg, to name a couple of composers.

On the program is the fiendishly difficult Violin Concerto, Op. 12 and Musica Viva has commissioned Sydney composer Jessica Wells to arrange this piece specifically for Signum and Winther.

Although people might associate Kurt Weill with German cabaret of the Weimar Republic, it’s worth remembering that he had a classical grounding and studied studio composition under Ferruccio Busoni.

Kristian, now 37, is well-acquainted with the music of Kurt Weill. His mother Vivienne is famously a Weill tragic who, every couple of years, would put on a Weill opera, so that as a teenager in Canberra, he grew up hearing it around the house. 

The innovative programming, he says, comes from Musica Viva’s newish artistic director Paul Kildea, who saw the opportunity to blend his violin with sax.

Kildea has come up with an audience-pleaser that features Gershwin’s “Three Preludes”, Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances” from “West Side Story”, Camilo’s “Caribe”, Bach, Weill and, from the perennially popular JS Bach, the “Italian” Concerto – “A concert that plays to everyone’s strengths,” Kristian says. 

“The saxophone may be a relatively new musical instrument, only patented in the 19th century, but it’s rather like organ and guitar in that its repertoire is huge, though not so much of it is known.”

He’s expecting Signum to arrive here with far more than just four instruments as they’ll be exploring the full variety of the saxophone’s potential. 

Signum Saxophone Quartet and Kristian Winther, Llewellyn Hall, 7pm, Thursday, November 17.