A City Full of Stories: Anna Phillips on her work with Academy of St Martin in the Fields' SoundWalk

Illustrations of SoundWalk by Ruby Wright

Anna Phillips is a harpist who is currently studying for a Master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Music. She had the opportunity to take part in the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields' SoundWalk project as part of an elective with the Open Academy Department at the Royal Academy of Music.

The Connection at St. Martin’s is a day centre that supports homeless people to help rebuild their lives, through helping them on their way out of homelessness and through artistic programmes. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (ASMF) chamber orchestra has been running music workshops with homeless people in various venues across London, including The Connection, for 25 years. Jackie Walduck, who leads these workshops, is also a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music. She has been leading the Academy’s partnership with this initiative, which is set to continue into the foreseeable future.  

The music programmes at The Connection are open to anyone who comes to the day centre. It is an environment where participants can connect with each other and explore their own voice and creativity through music and other creative workshops. 

My involvement came through the Open Academy Department, the Royal Academy of Music’s community and participation department. I was involved with the creation of a Soundwalk, an undertaking which not only marks 25 years of the ASMF working with the homeless community, but also part of the celebrations for the centenary of the orchestra’s founder, Sir Neville Marriner. The Soundwalk includes music composed by the clients from the centre, as well as the opportunity for incorporating lyrics or spoken word with the guidance of writer, Hazel Gould. This special project was recorded and will be available to listen to digitally while walking around St Martin in the Field’s and Covent Garden. 

Going into this experience, I was looking forward to meeting everyone involved. My hope was to make meaningful musical contributions to the group, as well as get to know each individual through musical explorations and improvisations together.  My first session at The Connection was the third session of the term. As part of this workshop, we started exploring words to create a song. It can feel vulnerable to contribute an idea, but the workshop space creates an environment where everyone can contribute in any way. There were lots of participants in this session and some lovely connections were made. For example, two participants began playing together in a call and response way, which happened organically, and it was lovely to see. Another was full of ideas, and he encouraged others too.

The next session I attended was divided into two parts: music and writing. Jackie warmed up the group with musical games, such as a call and response rhythm game and a warm-up jam. In these warm-ups you could hear how each person was feeling depending on how they would play their instrument. I enjoyed the warm-up jams because there was a space for each person to play a short musical improvisation. This reminded me why I enjoyed playing music as a child, because I was able to express myself without having to articulate it in words. Now that music is my career, it can be easier to lose sight of the playfulness and creativity of it. It has reminded me to play the harp for the child within me, who expressed herself with no self-judgement. Hazel then came to do a writing workshop to encourage lyric writing. We were split into smaller groups and each given an object. We were thinking about the story behind the object and if the object were to have feelings, what they might be. By the end of the session, we had created a verse that we spoke together; some people spoke the lyrics on their own which was a very special moment.

The last session I attended was more focused on rehearsing all our ideas for the song to be recorded for the Soundwalk in two weeks’ time. The harp seemed to act as a linchpin for the group as I was able to outline the harmony which grounded the song in this workshop. I worked with the rhythm section to ground the harmony, and then the other two groups explored drumming rhythms and a melody.

It was a wonderful experience to be a part of this project, and to witness such a welcoming space was really special. Being able to show up, be your authentic self and be able to participate in any way you like with no judgement is truly amazing. You can see the confidence it builds and the joy it brings to each person. I have been reminded that music doesn’t have to be complicated to be powerful, and everyone can write music or lyrics, especially when it comes from the heart. The only way to create in this way is to be in a safe and encouraging space, which is exactly what music at The Connection is.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields' SoundWalk A City Full of Stories is a free, immersive audio experience part of the Marriner 100 Celebrations. To take part in the SoundWalk, visit St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, and scan the QR code. 

Singing Wagner has been crucial: transgender tenor Holden Madagame on their journey towards singing Mime in Regents Opera's production of Siegfried

Holden Madagame as Mime in Wagner's Das Rheingold with Regents Opera in 2022

Regents Opera's production of Wagner's Siegfried as part of its ongoing Ring Cycle conducted by Ben Woodward and directed by Caroline Staunton opens at the Freemasons Hall, London, WC2B 5AZ on 4 February 2024 with further performances on 7 and 10 February. Here transgender tenor Holden Madagame talks about their transition from mezzo-soprano to tenor and the importance singing Wagner holds for them.

A few years after I came out as transgender, I sang for Ben Woodward, out of interest, in Regents Opera’s (then Fulham Opera’s) orchestral workshops. I had been on testosterone for about three years and was finally starting to come into my tenor voice after having trained as a mezzo-soprano at the University of Michigan. About seven years later, I continue to work with them and am debuting as Mime in their Ring Cycle.

Holden Madagame as Mime in Wagner's Das Rheingold
with Regents Opera in 2022

Transitioning from the gender of lyric mezzo to the gender of character tenor has been an interesting journey and has taught me a lot about the inherent stereotypes that our Fachs possess. I find that I’m often in a unique position to observe this, having seen multiple sides of this experience myself. At first I found this difficult, as I actually enjoyed singing as a mezzo-soprano, but over time I have come to deeply appreciate the nuance and skill of my Fach. Singing Wagner has been crucial to this. 

The parallels with who I am as a queer, transgender, indigenous [Native American, Odawa which is part of the Anishinaabe nation in the mid-west of the United States and Canada.] person and who I play on stage is not lost on me. My characters very often reflect the way that the world views me, which is as a character, a clown - strange, bewildering, entertaining, pitiable, cute, and/or fun. It has taken a lot of grace and self-awareness to retain my self-confidence while playing these types of roles.

Most roles that I sing are a maximum of about 25 minutes long. These are generally supporting roles that require precision, energy, excellent diction, and comedic timing. Although there is a long tradition of character tenor being a legitimate Fach, colleagues often describe them as ‘thankless’ and generally less respected. The roles themselves are also, I’m sad to say, often racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or ableist. The antisemitism baked into Mime should also be acknowledged, as this awareness can help us create modern interpretations of Wagner’s works without unintentionally perpetuating antisemitism. 

Mime from Siegfried is roughly five times larger than any role I have sung thus far, and absolutely the largest character role in all operatic repertoire. It is challenging, has a large vocal range both in tessitura and in the variety of colours that are written into the score, and emotionally much deeper than your average character role. Even in Rheingold we only get a glimpse of Mime’s complexity, and that is still considered a significant character role. Mime is an excellent example of a role that is neither easy nor meant for a singer without this specialism. Without the proper attention to the text, a sophisticated vocabulary of movement and acting choices, and the knowledge that it should not be sung ‘beautifully’, it has the potential to be the most boring role in the opera.

Something that significantly differentiates Regents Opera for me from other companies that I have worked with is the respect that all roles get. Each role is cast thoughtfully and each singer respected for the type of work they do. Working with director Caroline Staunton is an absolute pleasure, as she takes character roles very seriously and does not take any moment, piece of text, or opinions from her singers for granted. I have been able to use my natural impulses, which involve humour, surrealism, and grotesqueness, to create a well-rounded character that is not only psychologically troubling but in many ways relatable to the audience. 

On 4 February at the Freemason’s Temple in London, I will (to my knowledge) be the first transgender person to have sung Mime in Siegfried. This is a milestone not just for me, but for transgender opera singers around the world. My existence gives other trans singers hope in a very concrete way, and I’m thankful for the privilege and support to be able to exist this way in the world while making excellent music. 

Full details of Regent Opera's Ring Cycle from the company's website.

Slowly, through a process of osmosis, the piece and I are slowly becoming acquainted: horn player, Ben Goldscheider on Gavin Higgins' new Horn Concerto

Ben Goldscheider

Composer Gavin Higgins comes from a long lineage of working-class brass band musicians dating back to 1895 and his passion for this heritage has resulted in a number of vigorous, daring works for brass, including his Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and Orchestra, which won a 2023 RPS award and a South Bank Sky Arts award. 

Gavin Higgins' instrument is the French Horn and he has written a new Horn Concerto (his first solo work for the instrument) for horn player Ben Goldscheider. Gavin Higgins is composer-in-association with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Ben Goldscheider will join Jaime Martin and the orchestra to premiere Gavin Higgins' Horn Concerto on Saturday 13 January 2024 at Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, with a second performance on Sunday 14 January 2024 at St David's Hall in Cardiff [further details]. 

The London premiere of the work will be on 7 February at Cadogan Hall, when Ben Goldscheider joins the London Chamber Orchestra and conductor  Christopher Warren Green [further details]

In this article, Ben Goldscheider has taken a break from learning the new piece to write a few words of introduction.

It has long been an ambition of mine to enrich the Horn repertoire with new, high quality works. Not only are we in dire need of more pieces to play, but I also believe strongly that audiences can be won over with the extraordinary versatility of this Instrument. A lot has happened to the Horn since the glory days of Mozart and Strauss, whose Concertos rightly occupy a sacred place at the heart of our repertoire. Mechanically as well as in regards to player technique, the capabilities of the Horn have advanced significantly and with a work of the quality inherent in Gavin Higgins’ new Horn Concerto, these developments can be enjoyed and experienced in abundance. Indeed, Gavin has written a work that is simultaneously a true Horn Concerto to its core - it explores many tropes associated with the instrument; an Eb Horn Choral reminiscent of Wagner’s Ring, a programmatic connection to Nature, lively fanfares and a virtuosic, joyful Rondo reminiscent of, well, most Horn Concertos! With that in mind, however, the work very much looks forward and breaks new ground. In terms of sheer scope, it may be the most significant contribution for quite some time - it lasts just under thirty minutes. This in itself poses one of the greatest challenges for the soloist, how to balance the necessity to give everything to the powerful, soaring lines at the beginning, navigate the delicacies of the second movement and still have some suppleness left in the lips for the finale. By comparison, the longest Mozart Concerto (including a cadenza) barely breaks a quarter of an hour.

I find the use of orchestration particularly interesting. Having the four orchestral horns operate in a concertante style against the soloist evokes the Schumann Konzertstück or, perhaps more relevantly, Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto. It allows the material to morph between a collective, as in the opening where chords are built up and layered between the five Horns, as well as the five bouncing off one another, the sound of the Horn dominating and piercing through an already rich tapestry of orchestral colour.

As I write this I am deep in the learning process. Despite having had a lot of experience premiering new works, this will actually be the first large scale work for Horn and Orchestra that I have the pleasure of bringing to life. This in itself is fascinating for you have a totally blank canvas, no reference point or recordings and, as Leonard Bernstein suggested as an essential ingredient of the creative process, not quite enough time.

It is so enjoyable to sit with the score and, using nothing but the dots in front of you, bear the responsibility to extrapolate the essence of the music. You are forced to sit and ponder, to ask questions of yourself and the music and create connections as the material reveals itself to you. Slowly, through a process of osmosis, the piece and I are slowly becoming acquainted, I just hope that we become, and remain, friends!

Gavin Higgins

Jane Austen’s Music – a life-long obsession

In Spring 2024, Manchester University Press is publishing She played and sang: Jane Austen and music, a new book by Gillian Dooley, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Flinders University in South Australia. 

Music occupied a central role in Jane Austen's life, she played the piano from a young age and was encouraged by her Father. She made brilliant use of music in her books to illuminate characters' personalities and highlight the contrasts between them. 

In the new book, Gillian Dooley uses music books from Austen's immediate family circle, including her own, a treasure trove of evidence, along with letters, to unveil a previously unknown facet of Austen’s world. 

Here, Gillian Dooley talks about her life-long interest in Austen's life and work.

I was lucky to grow up in a home surrounded by music and books. I was learning the piano and singing from the age of six, and I can still remember the thrill of being able to read a book for myself. So when I first read Pride and Prejudice I immediately noticed that several characters were musical. I recall a discussion of the importance of that fact in an English class more than fifty years ago.

Coming back to study as a mature-age student in the middle of the 1990s, I chose to write my English Honours thesis at Flinders University (South Australia) on ‘The Meaning of Music in the Novels of Jane Austen’. At the time I was only dimly aware of the Austen Family music books, and I wrote in my Introduction that I was not interested in pursuing the ‘elusive biographical quest’ of exploring her personal attitudes to and aptitude for music. My home town of Adelaide is a very long way from Hampshire and even if I’d known more about the music books, at that time I wouldn’t have had a chance to travel and consult them. 

Slowly things began to change. Someone gave me a 2004 CD, The Jane Austen Songbook, and I discovered Jane Austen’s Music, Ian Gammie and Derek McCulloch’s 1996 catalogue of the music books held at the Jane Austen Memorial Trust at Chawton in Hampshire. I still couldn’t access the books themselves but I could get an idea of what music was in them. Most of the music, I found, is either for solo keyboard or for voice and piano accompaniment. I quickly discovered that very little of the music in these books is still in print, so tracking down copies of the songs depended on access to historical collections, some of which, miraculously, had already been digitised. I organised the first Jane Austen’s Music concert in 2007, a program built mainly around what music I could get hold of from these collections and from libraries.

In 2010 I was finally able to travel to the UK on a research trip and spent some time consulting the books, transcribing some songs and piano pieces for future programs. I made contact with the scholars and curators who were working with the books. I began to get a sense of this amazing collection that has survived for more than two centuries.

The Austen family music that was available at that time has since been supplemented by the discovery of more volumes. More than twenty albums are now available to consult, plus some loose sheets, and, while several of these belonged to members of the extended Austen family, there are seven that we are fairly certain belonged to Jane Austen herself. Four of these are, either wholly or in part, in her handwriting – that is, she copied existing music onto music manuscript paper for her own use. The other three are bound collections of printed music with her ownership marks. So that ‘elusive biographical quest’ was not so elusive after all. While we know that this is not the complete collection of music that Jane Austen owned or had access to, we can get quite a good idea of the music that she liked to play.

In 2015 the University of Southampton digitised the eighteen volumes available at that time. Finally they were available to view online. This was a great boon to Austen scholarship in general, of course, but to me it was a goldmine and I wanted to be able to plunder it for all it was worth. To do that I needed a complete catalogue. Since my career has been in librarianship, I was familiar with creating catalogues and so, with the blessing (and assistance) of the librarians at Southampton, I set about cataloguing all the playable pieces of music. The project took me more than three years and was both painstaking and fascinating. I discovered composers I had never heard of, French revolutionary songs, German drinking songs, and some exquisite music which would never be heard today if it hadn’t been in Austen’s collection.

I still remember the moment when it dawned on me that she played and sang. I don’t know why it surprised me - roughly half of her collection is vocal music. She seems to have had a high soprano voice, going by the scores we have. Few of the songs are highly virtuosic – Italian opera was not her thing – but they are not necessarily easy. Most of the music is from the late eighteenth century, dating from a time when accompaniments were not fully notated, so she would not only have sung but would have improvised her own piano parts using the bass line provided. Her niece remembered, fifty years after she died, listening to her play and sing.

All this time I had been writing about Austen and music, and eventually I began to think about what it meant for Austen the writer to have also been a musician. The natural next step was to pull together my nearly thirty years of writing and thinking about, and performing, Jane Austen’s music. She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music is the result – a survey of the music we know she knew, and what it can tell us about her life, her family relationships, and her writing.

Find out more at my Jane Austen’s Music website

First Person: soprano Holly Brown on rehearsing the Guildhall School's current double bill of Respighi operas

Respighi double bill in rehearsal - Guildhall School (Photo: David Monteith-Hodge - Photographise)

The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is currently performing a double bill of Respighi's Maria egiziaca and La bella dormente nel bosco. In this First Person article, Holly Brown reflects on her experiences rehearsing for the production.

My name is Holly Brown and I'm a soprano in my second year of Opera Studies at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In the Respighi double bill, I am singing Maria in Maria egiziaca (8 and 13 November) and I'm playing La Fata Verde (the Green Fairy) in La bella dormente nel bosco.

I have wanted to be an opera singer probably for longer than the average performer; initially making the decision at eleven. My love for opera and singing began at school when my classmates started having singing lessons and I wanted to join in and try it too. When my sister decided that she wanted to be a doctor, all the conversations at home were about the steps she would need to take to do it. I think some part of me wanted the focus to be on my future career too and at that point I thought that singing sounded fun enough to do for a job. I’ve never re-evaluated that choice and fifteen years later, here I am. 

I had heard of La bella dormente nel bosco before, having watched the Guildhall Opera production online a few years ago (this was during the pandemic when students couldn’t give live performances). However, I had absolutely no knowledge of Maria egiziaca. I’d never heard of it before, and when Dominic [Wheeler] announced the production, it took me a while to find recordings online because I couldn’t work out how he was spelling it! When both opera casts were announced to our year group, I was quite concerned to find out that I had a speaking role for La bella dormente nel bosco – it’s a bit of a surprise when after seven years of music training and you get a part that doesn’t require singing! When Dominic announced my role as Maria in Maria egiziaca, it all started to make a bit more sense. From that point on, preparations began and the excitement (and nerves!) started to kick in.

I think the most rewarding part of performing in productions at Guildhall School is to the chance to collaborate and perform with your friends and classmates. We get the opportunity to work together for a really long time and to develop our relationships. I’m finding rehearsals for La bella dormente nel bosco incredibly enjoyable – you have frogs, fairies, a great big spindle - all sorts! As the Green Fairy, I get to be the ‘evil’ one playing opposite the ‘good’ Blue Fairy, performed by Yolisa Ngwexana. During the production, Yolisa and I engage in a sort of Fairy Wars, having to fight each other in the middle of the opera. During rehearsals, we’ve been holding conductors’ batons and pretending that CGI is going on around us, making it look a lot more epic than it actually is! It’s become such a notable moment in rehearsals that it’s even known as Fairy Wars on the call sheet… 

Maria egiziaca is different and the subject is far more serious. It’s a religious piece and a profound story. The source material doesn't necessarily give you a lot of laughs, so it has felt fairly important in the rehearsal room to try and keep the mood light, finding moments of relief where we can. 

Out of both operas, I have fallen in love with the romance of La bella dormente nel bosco - it's really perfect fairy-tale music. One of my particular highlights is the second aria sung by Yolisa as the Blue Fairy, who is singing these beautiful, high sparkly coloratura lines - it just sounds like pure magic. There are some beautiful chorus moments in Bella as well, each portraying different roles– they are mourners, stars and frogs (to name but a few!). The versatility of the chorus and the beauty of the music really brings these special moments together. The music of Maria, however, is a different story entirely. It’s difficult to imagine that the same composer has written both operas. Maria egiziaca’s music is also very beautiful, but there are moments of true pain in there, and dissonance. 

I think what I love most about the staging is that we have the most beautiful set [made by designer Laura Jane Stanfield] that houses both operas in creative and stunning ways. Victoria Newlyn, our director, has an incredible vision for this production. Newlyn’s approach made us question the imagery of both fairies and religious icons – it’s easy to look at them and not quite see the reality they are meant to portray, but on stage, it’s what you have to create; you have to show the audience someone they connect with on a human level. Mary of Egypt might be a holy saint now, but at one point she was a real woman, with lived experiences. The characters in Bella aren’t taken from history, but they still experience love, loss and pain like we do. All through the rehearsal process, Victoria has been reminding us of this and pushing us to see all these characters as real flesh-and-blood people, not just beautiful pictures in a storybook or church window. I hope that this will come across to our audiences and that, while experiencing some beautiful music, they might also recognise the humanity in the stories we're telling.  

I think audiences can expect to feel a range of emotions from the evening - from the gorgeousness of the fairy tale in Bella to the discovery and transformation found in Maria – both are human stories with a wide scope of emotion.

Performances of Respighi's Maria egiziaca and La bella dormente nel bosco directed by Victoria Newlyn and conducted by Dominic Wheeler are at Guildhall School of Music & Drama from 6 – 13 November. Details from the Guildhall School's website.

Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World - violinist Fenella Humphreys introduces her programme of important but neglected figures of 20th century music

Leah Broad & Fenella Humphreys (Photo: Alejandro Tamagno)

On Sunday 5 November 2023, violinist Fenella Humphreys joins forces with author Leah Broad and pianist Nicola Eimer at Milton Court Concert Hall to explore some of the most important but neglected figures of 20th century music. Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World features music by Doreen Carwithen, one of Britain’s first women film composers, Rebecca Clarke, acclaimed for her musical experimentation, Dorothy Howell, a prodigy who shot to fame at the Proms, and Ethel Smyth, a highly versatile composer of exceptional quality.

Here, Fenella Humphreys explores her introduction to the composers and their music.

When I was about eight or nine years old I was given Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne to learn. It was a genuine life-changer - I hadn’t realised until then just how music could make you feel, and it definitely made me want to become a musician.

It was only years later that it occurred to me how unusual it was that it was written by a woman. I look back at the music I played and sang as a child, and I barely remember any that wasn’t written by a fairly narrow group of men.

Once I started playing more new music I often played works by living women. With older repertoire though, led by my teachers on choices women simply weren’t included and it was so ingrained I didn’t even question it. 

After college, I started exploring music that wasn’t often played and gradually started finding more and more musically underrepresented groups (women, people of other ethnicities, people with the ‘wrong’ political ideologies etc.) who had simply disappeared or been written out of history. There was an attitude that if their music hadn’t survived it meant it simply wasn’t as ‘good’ as works that had, but the more of this music I played, the more really good music I was finding. The argument just didn’t hold water. But often getting hold of the sheet music was a real problem where works had fallen out of print and there was no estate fighting for the music.

I carry on searching out scores and composers - sometimes you’ll find things in charity shops, trawling through early proms programmes, finding old LPs - you never know what will pop up. And because I’ve recorded a few works that aren’t so well known, I now get sent music by families of composers which I always do my best to perform. Finding the funding to record can be more problematic but it feels so important where music is good, to make sure it doesn’t just disappear into the mists of time.

One place I knew I was always sure to find out about composers I didn’t know was Leah Broad’s social media. Eventually last year we met in real life at a festival celebrating the 100th anniversary of composer Doreen Carwithen. We decided it would be a great idea to collaborate. Looking through the lists of composers and repertoire that she’d researched I just couldn’t believe how much music and composers there still were out there I’d never come across.

We had a few ideas for programming and other ways we could collaborate outside the concert hall, but decided to start off with a words and music performance based around the four composers in Leah’s new book, Quartet - Ethel Smyth (1858-1940, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), Dorothy Howell (1898-1982) and Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003). Each of them had written a sonata for violin and piano, and some had written more.

I already knew Doreen Carwithen’s Sonata through the good luck of having been asked by the William Alwyn Foundation (Alwyn was Doreen Carwithen’s husband) to perform and record it a few years ago. It’s an extraordinary work: bold, imaginative, well crafted and full of colour.

I was properly shocked when I found Ethel Smyth had written a sonata - I felt sure I’d have heard of a major work by someone that well known. But I hadn’t and it was a revelation when I started to get to know it. It was written in 1887, fairly early in her career when she was in her late 20s. The music is definitely influenced by Brahms and the the music she was hearing around her in Leipzig but again full of personality and passion. Fortunately it was still in print so at least it was easy enough to get hold of.

With Rebecca Clarke I had learnt her viola sonata which absolutely is core repertoire but hadn’t been aware of the violin music until fairly recently. I’d been asked to include her Midsummer Moon in a programme, and kept programming it elsewhere because it’s such special music. It’s one of those pieces that people always single out in a programme when they come to talk to you after a concert. With the two sonatas though, written much earlier, when I first started looking for the music I was worried we were going to have some proper work to do to find them. But by incredible good luck, just then Sleepy Puppy Press announced publication of new editions of both works. 

Dorothy Howell was the one composer of the four I didn’t know at all as we started - and she’s now possibly the one I love most. As a very young woman, her career started illustriously with Proms commissions and premieres - she was the talk of the town. But as writing styles around her changed and hers didn’t, she became less and less performed. We’re indebted to her niece and nephew who saved all her scores when, late in her life she felt nobody was interested in her music and was intent on burning it all. One of her works is available on IMSLP, and Schott are about to republish a couple of others that were out of print. However The Moorings and her Sonata which we wanted to include in the programme were both very much out of print. Leah asked around and eventually we found that alongside the copy of the sonata in the British Library there was one in another library. But it had been out on loan for a very long time. After some increasingly desperate messages back and forth it was returned and our programme was nearly complete. Just The Moorings was missing. After a good amount of detective work, Leah managed to get her hands on a slightly wobbly photo of the score off the black market somewhere. I re-typeset it and we were good to go. 

It’s been a wonderful time getting to know these composers and their music - and their stories through Leah’s brilliant narration. The plan is to extend these programmes to bring more composers’ lives and stories to light. In the meantime we can’t wait to perform the current programme of extraordinary music and stories at Barbican on 5th November at 4pm.

Violinist Fenella Humphreys is joined by pianist Nicola Eimer and narrator Leah Broad for Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World at Milton Court Concert Hall on Sunday 5 November 2023, featuring music by Ethel Smyth, Doreen Carwithen, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell.

full details from the Barbican website.

A bold statement of cultural synthesis: Vache Baroque's Jonathan Darbourne on celebrating the art of Salmone Rossi

Vache Baroque (Photo: The Photography Shed)

This Autumn, Vache Baroque is presenting a multi-event project to commemorate 400 years since the Jewish-Italian composer Salomone Rossi (ca. 1570 – 1630) published his ground-breaking collection The Songs of Solomon in 1623. Here, Vache Baroque's artistic director Jonathan Darbourne introduces their Rossi 400 project.

Joanthan Darbourne (Photo: Vache Baroque)

I’ll admit something from the outset: before this project, I can’t remember ever having sung a piece by Salomone Rossi. This has made discovering his music all the more exciting, as everything I played through or heard on recordings when planning the programmes was brand new. Parallel to this was researching those who have performed his music or have an interest in his life, which has led to connections being made with all sorts of wonderful people - novelists, academics, rabbis, cantors, instrumentalists, organ builders, broadcasters. Over the course of about eight months, we will have celebrated Rossi through film, dance, instruments, voices, interviews, and even a Jewish-Italian dining experience. And next year we will take one of the programmes to Italy, his homeland.

So why Rossi? 2023 marks 400 years since the publication of his ground-breaking vocal collection The Songs of Solomon. This highly novel work contains over thirty pieces with Hebrew texts - mostly psalms - set to music of a contemporary polyphonic style. Of course, composers across Reformation Europe had for quite some time set vernacular texts to a style of sacred music originally used for Latin, the lingua franca of the Church. Rossi’s task, however, was different: there was no precedent in the remembered or notated Jewish musical tradition for multi-voiced sacred music, and Hebrew, being read from right to left, presented an obvious problem when printing it with left-to-right musical notation. (This last issue was resolved in a rather democratic manner by printing the full word at the start of a phrase and letting the singers decide how to space the syllables.)

The long, multi-authored preface attests to the time and thought Rossi and his close circle had put into such an experimental project. It was absolutely a ‘grand plan,’ with the aim to rediscover (or reinvent) the music that would have been heard in the First Temple in Jerusalem thousand of years before. The Songs of Solomon was a bold statement of cultural synthesis, an attempt to breathe new life into Jewish ceremony and worship by utilising a Gentile art form.

We think this mixing together of seemingly clashing cultures deserves celebration and chimes so strongly with our mission at Vache Baroque and those of so many other arts organisations. Taking inspiration from this, our first offering was to mix old and new by making two music videos with madrigal backing tracks - one by Rossi, the other by a fan of his, Thomas Weelkes. We gave the texts modern storylines which were realised through the movement of two dancers from BirdGang Ltd and choreographed by the dancer-actor Ukweli Roach. [watch FAREWELLS on YouTube]

To place Rossi within his musical and cultural world, we are now in the middle of a series of performances being given in London synagogues [11 November 2023, further details] and in the hall of The Vache house [4 November 2023, further details]. These programmes place the sacred and secular vocal music by Rossi alongside pieces by contemporaries such as Monteverdi, Caccini, Byrd, Weelkes, Campion, and Kapsberger. Madrigals, solo songs, motets, metrical psalm settings, and a handful of settings from ‘The Songs of Solomon’ attest to a highly diverse and experimental musical climate - what we like to view now as a shift from Renaissance rules to Baroque rule breaking.

To finish the year, the acclaimed ensemble La Vaghezza will join eight singers and two instrumentalists from Vache Baroque at St John's Smith Square [13 December 2023, further details]. Here we will plot the story of Hanukkah through Rossi’s psalm settings and pieces on the same texts by composers including Schütz, Cavalli, Ravenscroft, and Purcell. It promises to be an evening of surprising contrasts and a chance for us to celebrate not just Rossi’s vocal music but his ravishing compositions in trio texture, in which he was the first composer to make publications. It has been a fantastic journey so far for so many of us and we are looking forward to the final 'gala' feel of this closing concert. 

Tips for musicians setting up a music festival: Shiry Rashkovsky, founder of Up Close and Musical, reflects on festival creation

Shiry Rashkovsky & violinist Fenella Humphreys at Up Close and Musical in 2022

Viola-player Shiry Rashkovsky's Up Close and Musical festival returned to the Fidelio Café this month, opening with mezzo-soprano Lucy Schaufer, pianist Ben Dawson and Trio Klein in a storm-themed programme of music by living, and mainly women, composers [see my review] and ends tonight, 18 October 2023, with soprano & composer Héloïse Werner, multi-instrumentalist Shri Sriram and cellist Max Baillie in Best of October House Records with music by Love Ssega, Jasmin Kent Rodgman, Jonathan Cole, and Max Baillie [further details]. Shiry founded Up Close and Musical in 2020 to help demystify the world of classical music, combining intimate performances, artist-curated programmes, and artist interviews, along with food and drink [read my 2021 interview with Shiry].

In this article, Shiry reflects on the whole process of festival creation.

I founded Up Close and Musical at Fidelio Café because I wanted to give audiences a chance not only to listen to music up close but to hear from the musicians themselves about their daily lives through informal chats mid-performance with me posing the questions. The festival has evolved from year to year; in the second year I invited an all-female roster and focused heavily on female composers, and in this third year I extended the festival format to include a film screening and behind-the-scenes look at the 2023 Hollywood blockbuster Chevalier and integrated an even wider array of musical genres than before, spanning contemporary, folk, musical theatre, jazz and of course classical. It’s been a wild ride from the fraught first year in which I had to postpone thrice due to the pandemic, and the momentum it’s gained since then is staggering. I had wanted to bring this musical concept to life for some time, and am so glad I persisted. Here are some things that I learned, most of which I could really, really have done with someone telling me beforehand.

Establishing the project:

Do not be alarmed - this takes time, which seems like the sort of thing that someone with project management experience would know but that they forgot to tell us in conservatoire. I found that there’s a certain growth that can only come from the repetition of a festival (at whatever frequency you run it); people become familiar with the name and artistic concept through press exposure and word of mouth. By Up Close and Musical’s second year we had people returning with friends for more -  that kind of strengthening of your audience base is something that you simply can’t fast-track. It brings utter joy when you notice it.

Performing while Artistic Directing:

Your nerves will take a hit from this, but not in the way you might expect. Recently I’ve found that I don’t get nervous onstage but the split in focus that comes from preparing to perform and managing the smooth running of the day - ensuring artists have what they need and rehearsals run on time, sorting through kinks with the venue and ticketing, or any number of curveballs that fly at you right up to the minute you have to go and play - can be quite a stressor. You can mitigate this with assiduous over-preparation but ultimately the results are most satisfying when all you have to think about it your performance, and that’s a challenging environment to simulate when you are in charge of everything else all the time, so take it with a handful of salt when you can. Across the three years of Up Close and Musical I found it easiest to schedule any performance I might be in with Trio Klein at the start of the festival, riding the wave of pre-festival preparations and allowing for more space to engage with inter-performance matters as they arose later.

Artistic Directing while not performing:

This is less fun, for those of us who love to perform. Don’t get me wrong, I get a huge kick out of compering and interviewing the artists during their performances, and engaging exciting and well spoken artists to share their musical experiences is integral to Up Close and Musical’s artistic concept, but somehow I always feel like something is missing when I’m there without my instrument, like I’ve only expressed myself halfway. An odd feeling and certainly not a complaint, but worth bearing in mind.

First Person: Sholto Kynoch, artistic director of Oxford International Song Festival

Sholto Kynoch

As the Oxford International Song Festival (formerly the Oxford Lieder Festival) opens tomorrow, artistic director and founder Sholto Kynoch reflects on 22 years of festival making.

It might be the first time it’s been the Oxford International Song Festival, as we change from Oxford Lieder, but for the 22nd time in my life, I am sat at home waiting for the Festival to begin tomorrow. I reflect that, as of this year, I’ve now been doing this for more than half my life! Some things have changed significantly since the early days, when a group of student friends started a little festival. Some things remain very much the same.

Tonight is what I might call uncomfortably calm. I know that the brilliant Festival team have everything under control, I’m more or less on top of my own preparations, and there’s really nothing more to be done. And yet it’s hard to relax, even with takeaway fish and chips and a glass of wine. There’s always that feeling that I’ve surely missed something, coupled with a childlike excitement that will probably keep me awake all night. My requisite three annual anxiety dreams are long done and dusted: it’s all real now.

That sense of anticipation has been a consistent eve-of-Festival feature over the years. Though there are plenty of demanding and stressful elements to running an event like this, this is my favourite time of the year. When else do I get to perform what I want, with who I want, where I want? When else do I get to immerse myself in other people’s wonderful music-making multiple times every day for sixteen days? And when else do so many friends, both musicians and attendees, fly in from all over the world – or just pop round the corner – for this celebratory fortnight of song?

There are some things I don’t have to worry about anymore. Twenty years ago, I’d have been up half the night formatting, printing and folding programmes. I’d have been fielding questions from artists who’d not been given any advance information on their rehearsals, and probably making up last-minute posters and the like. Friends would help out, but we were learning on the job. Today, we have an exceptional team, led by our brilliant Director of Administration Taya Smith, who make everything run like clockwork. So at least I won’t be worrying about those things.

The Festival programme is very personal, something I’ve spent at least a year thinking about in detail, and longer than that planning in concept. Unveiling it – earlier in the year – is always a tense moment (will people like it?) but now I’ll be worrying all night how people will actually experience it. Feedback this year has been great, but I don’t believe it until I see it. There’s no point doing this if people aren’t enjoying it, and something I’ve learnt over the years is also what a profound experience the Festival, at its best, can be for people. It’s not the happy-go-lucky approach of those early years: it’s much more important, and the pressure has grown proportionally.

We may have ‘professionalised’, but the essence of the Festival is the same. Whenever I’m not playing, I like to be standing at the door greeting everyone personally. The atmosphere is welcoming, fun and informal. We’ve seen many friendships made (and the Festival has even been an unwitting matchmaker on more than one occasion!) and it’s always wonderful seeing the mix of new and familiar faces arriving for concerts.

So, I think I won’t sleep well tonight, but I will wake up tomorrow bursting with energy and eager for the day ahead. With any luck, enough energy to see me through sixteen days and then I can collapse. It’s a fortnight like no other, and I can’t wait.

The Oxford International Song Festival ART:SONG Images / Words / Music’ runs from 13 to 28 October in venues across Oxford. More information from the Festival website.