Who or what inspired you to take up singing, and make it your career?
I’ve always sung, since I was a little girl, and I’ve always loved music. So singing as a job seemed like a natural step. However, I didn’t follow a logical route, as I first became a Barrister, after reading Law at Cambridge University. But the lure of singing was too great in the end, and so I accepted a place at the Royal College of Music and I’ve never looked back.
Who or what were the most important influences on your singing?
My most important influence has been my wonderful teacher, Lillian Watson. She has brought me to where I am today and I owe her everything. I have also been very lucky and have come into contact with some amazing artists who have guided me: Sir Thomas Allen, who gave me my first role as Mrs Herring in his production of Albert Herring at the RCM; Christa Ludwig, who has given a number of masterclasses I was fortunate enough to participate in; the late great Philip Langridge, who coached me in song and presentation; and currently Dame Anne Evans, who is guiding me through all of the Wagner roles I am learning.
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
Balancing being a wife and mother with a career that often takes me far away from home.
Which performances / recordings are you most proud of?
Every performance or recording is a learning experience, and so as long as I’ve given my best I’m proud of all of them. But I suppose if I had to select one, I would say my debut at the Salzburg Festival in Mozart’s La Betulia Liberata.
Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in?
The Wigmore Hall. There’s no better acoustic to perform in – it’s a beautiful space.
Favourite pieces to perform? Listen to?
In oratorio, I love Mahler 2 and Das Lied von der Erde, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Verdi’s Requiem and Bach’s St Matthew Passion. I also love song repertoire, especially by Schubert, Brahms Britten and Mahler, and in opera I love singing Wagner. My favourite pieces to listen to are Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, Mozart’s Requiem and anything by Mumford and Sons!
Who are your favourite musicians?
Christa Ludwig, Dame Janet Baker, Sir John Tomlinson, and Stephen Hough.
What is your most memorable concert experience?
Singing Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the Dallas Symphony under Van Zweden. It was simply wonderful.
What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?
Always be true to yourself, and work hard. Preparation is everything!
What is your most treasured possession?
My home. I spend a lot of my time away, so time at home with my family is precious.
“Pristine tonal balance and pure tuning…intimate music-making…sensitively sung…vigorously projected”
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE, 2012
A chance to hear Platinum Concert in a promotional film for their debut CD ‘In the Dark (Resonus Classics). Platinum Consort was founded in 2005 by Claire Jaggers and Scott Inglis-Kidger, a recent Meet the Artist interviewee. Their debut recording (on the Resonus Classics label), which juxtaposes early and modern choral music, is available now, and has already received high praise in the music press.
Platinum Consort will be performing at King’s Place on Saturday 1st September. Further information on their website:
Who or what inspired you to take up composing and make it your career?
It was my first instrument, the trombone, that led me to composition. I was unhappy with the exercises I’d been set to practice after my first few lessons, so I decided to write some alternatives. I found this much more interesting than practicing, and so that’s how I started composing!
After that I couldn’t get enough of it. I would write alternative harmonisations of hymns while not singing in the choir at church, and I went through one phase of about a year of writing a new little piece every day (for the exercise rather than for performance).
Although things like this account for about my first 7 or 8 years of composing, I only became “seriously” interested when the composer Steve Martland visited my school for a BBC education project and decided to take me under his wing and encourage me. So I’d say he was one of my first inspirations to make a serious go of it.
Who or what are the most important influences on your composing?
The most direct influences are other composers, in particular the German late romantic / early modern tradition, from Wagner through Mahler to Schoenberg, and in particular Berg. Not a huge amount of newer music, but certainly that of Messiaen, Xenakis, Andriessen among relatively recent composers. But I am also influenced by music that I play (I do a lot of playing, at an amateur and occasionally professional level), which can be anything from wind/brass band music to jazz standards to a wide variety of orchestral and chamber music. Music that I play has a habit of finding its way, heavily filtered, into music that I write. At the moment for example Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” is spending a lot of time in my head as we’re learning it in the quartet in which I play viola!
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
I hesitate to describe my composing as “a career” as that implies there is a) some structure to it and b) some financial reward, whereas in reality there is neither. The greatest challenge is probably the same for any composer – to simply keep writing, and find a reason to keep writing, in the face of public indifference! And of course, to persuade people to perform your music.
What are the particular challenges/excitements of working with an orchestra/ensemble?
Without question, the first moment of hearing your piece come alive. While it’s the first time the players might have seen it, you the composer have come to know the piece intimately from its first sketches, so you have to be patient and wait for it to emerge. Sometimes the reality can turn out to be quite different to what you imagined, but over time you try to get better at accurately imagining during the composing process.
I really like the process of working with performers. It’s the unexpected touches they put in that really bring a piece to life – their “interpretation”, notes that are fractionally late, rhythms slightly slower than written, their frustrations with it, or whatever; it’s the unplanned bits that make music come to life and make it infinitely more exciting than hearing a computer play it!
Which recordings are you most proud of?
I haven’t got many recordings of my pieces, but I usually get at least one for each piece that’s performed. The one I’m most proud of would be the London Sinfonietta playing my piece Antagony, which won the 1993/94 BBC Young Musician of the Year award for composers – I was 17 at the time and writing a 20 minute piece for two wind bands, amplified strings, and 6 percussionists seemed quite practical. Fortunately, for the BBC and the Sinfonietta, and conductor Martyn Brabbins, this posed no problem! And today I have a great recording and a great memory of a special occasion.
Do you have a favourite concert venue?
The Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre – I first played there in a brass ensemble at 15 and have played there (and heard my music played there) many times since. There’s something timeless about the backstage area and things like the odd signs for performers in Russian that they used to have that’s really special, and the staff are really friendly and professional. I also think that the leather seats in the auditorium are the most comfortable in any concert hall in the UK. I’d much rather my listeners were comfortable when being confronted with my music!
Who are your favourite musicians?
They are the ones I play with most regularly – my quartet, local brass band, etc. They are definitely not well-known international concert artists but some of them are really outstanding musicians and great fun to play with!
What is your most memorable concert experience?
Hearing Louis Andriessen’s De Snelheid and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex played by (I think) the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall when I was a teenager. I was brought there by Steve Martland (see above) and it was the moment when I vividly remember thinking “THIS is what I want to do with my life”.
What is your favourite music to play? To listen to?
To play – perhaps boringly, I really enjoy playing the music of the old masters: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, etc. There’s a reason why they are considered great composers and it’s so clear every time you play their music. There’s also so much that can be learnt by playing music like that!
To listen to – I have very broad tastes but I actually don’t listen to a huge amount of music. At the moment I enjoy listening to random avant-garde electronic music by people on Soundcloud or to odd online classical music radio stations and just seeing what’s on. I’m a great believer in serendipity!
What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians/students?
To follow what you want to do; don’t get put off by public indifference and by chasing easy fame by playing (or writing) crowd-pleasers. If you aren’t moved by what you do then no-one else will be.
What are you working on at the moment?
An opera about the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, for premiere in July 2013, 100 years after her famous / notorious death under a racehorse while protesting at the Derby. Please have a look at: http://www.emilyopera.co.uk!
Where would you like to be in 10 years’ time?
Taking a curtain call to a rapturous audience at Bayreuth after the successful premiere of my latest opera. Failing that I’ll settle for being happy, healthy and not too poor in some part of the world with nice landscape!
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being outdoors somewhere spectacular without any worries about anything or anyone.
What is your most treasured possession?
My brain.
What do you enjoy doing most?
Other than carefree time with my wife and daughter, I’d say playing great music with other people – music that everyone finds challenging but just within their technical ability…
Tim Benjamin is also the co-founder of Clements Theory, the leading e-learning resource for ABRSM and Trinity Guildhall Grade 5 Theory. Tim has written a comprehensive set of Grade 5 Theory study guides which are used on the website, and he also designed and edited many of the questions. Further information here
Who or what inspired you to take up your chosen instrument and make music your career?
My mum and dad: Dad was a devoted brass band player, there was always music in the house (he had a gorgeous walnut radiogram, with piles of records – mostly 78s!). They fixed up violin lessons for me, made me practise, came to almost every concert I did, helped get me in the NYO, and thence to Cambridge.
Who or what are the most important influences on your playing?
My colleagues in the Fitzwilliam Quartet! But before that, our mentor, Sidney Griller and his quartet; the Smetana Quartet; the Beethoven and Borodin Quartets (for Shostakovich); violinist Alfredo Campoli (the ideal violin sound); conductors Otto Klemperer and Roger Norrington (two totally opposite approaches to Beethoven); clarinettists Alan Hacker and Lesley Schatzberger (opening my eyes to historical performance practice); Dmitri Shostakovich himself – the greatest man I have ever met, whose very presence and humility imparted a belief in what we were doing, and a confidence to press on into the future; the greatest performer I have ever heard (not in the flesh, sadly): Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau;
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
Starting off and making headway in the real world as a professional string quartet; playing to Shostakovich; our New York debut – then the complete Shostakovich cycle there; re-building the quartet post- Chris Rowland (it took over twelve years!), and maintaining its profile and pre-eminence in these times of age discrimination in the music world; getting John Eliot Gardiner to observe the spirit and letter of Beethoven’s metronome marks (without seeming too cocky for my position!); getting my own playing onto a higher level, in order not to let the other three down (whilst spending a disproportionate amount of time on admin….).
What are the pleasures and pitfalls of ensemble work?
As a “team player” (which is the most satisfying role for a violist) one can achieve collective heights one could never achieve on one’s own – especially since the FSQ plays to a higher standard than I could ever reach myself! Those concerts (which happen rarely) when everyone is pulling together for the common benefit of quartet and composer, when you feel anyone can do anything, and everyone else will respond and be with each other. The pitfalls are when that doesn’t happen…. Or when individuals prioritise themselves before the group.
Which performances/recordings are you most proud of?
The Shostakovich cycle, of course – although many of them we play better now! The Franck quartet. The Brahms clarinet quintet (with Lesley Schatzberger). Wolf’s Italian Serenade – as virtuosic as we could get in the old days! Then, latterly, our first ever public performance of Schubert’s Death & the Maiden (after 42 years! – as good as I’ve ever heard it from anyone…..).
Who are your favourite musicians?
The ones I play with: my colleagues in the quartet, plus Anna Tilbrook (piano), Moray Welsh (cello), Lesley Schatzberger (clarinet), Carolyn Sparey (viola); also those influential musicians mentioned above.
The Fitzwilliam Quartet
What is your most memorable concert experience?
16th November 1972, Lyons Concert Hall, York: packed to the rafters to witness us play Shostakovich No.13 with the composer in the audience. I have never in my life experienced such electricity in the air, or intensity of applause.
What advice would you give to aspiring musicians/students?
Don’t get in the way of the music or the composer! Be faithful to both the spirit and the letter of the score – i.e. inform yourself as to the exact meaning of the notation, the performing conventions and sound according to the period of music in question. Aim to perfect every aspect of your “craft”, in the service of both the music and your own self-expression – but never impose the latter: this would imply that your own personality is not strong enough to stand on its own. Ego is no substitute for the humility and character required to communicate with your audience.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Manchester United overturning the rich pretenders from Man City next year!
What is your most treasured possession?
My family, my friends, my health, my viola, a lock of my late daughter’s hair
What do you enjoy doing most?
Drinking good beer or wine, eating Italian food (or Indian), playing (now watching…) cricket, walking, cycling.
The Fitzwilliam Quartet with pianist Anna Tilbrook perform music by Hugo Wolf, Rebecca Clarke, Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms on Sunday 8th May as part of the London Chamber Music Society’s Sunday Concerts series. More information/tickets
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Who or what inspired you to take up your chosen instrument and make music your career?
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 