Johann Sebastian Bach

FLA 32: Joanna Wyld (09/11/2025)

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Of all the guests I’ve had on First Last Anything so far, Kent-born Joanna Wyld might have worn the most musical hats. Writer, musician, composer, librettist, teacher and administrator, she’s played in orchestras, concert bands and pop groups, she has a passion for everything from bellringing to soul music, and has been a prolific writer of articles, liner notes and concert programme notes for many years. Her writing is always so perceptive, thoughtful, colourful, nuanced and (underrated quality, this) informative.

In conversation, Joanna is no different. What follows, the highlights from a couple of hours on Zoom one afternoon in October 2025, could easily have run twice as long. I love it when a conversation with a guest introduces me to many new pieces, and this is certainly one of those occasions. We both hope you enjoy reading it, and sampling Joanna’s wide-ranging listening choices – not only her First, Last and wildcard selections, but all her other suggestions too.

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JUSTIN LEWIS:

So to begin with, what music do you first remember hearing in your home? Because I know you have a very eclectic taste – was that always there?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, I think ‘eclectic’ is a really good reflection of my home growing up. I didn’t grow up in what you would describe as a musical household. Everyone loved music, but my parents weren’t classically trained – my dad can’t read music but loves it, my mum can read music, and plays the piano and the organ.

We were never told that a particular genre was better than others. We had a good eclectic range of records that we enjoyed playing. I think the first record I learned to put on the record player independently was The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. And there were quite a few Beatles singles, but also my brothers and I would use music to capture our imaginations a bit. Because we’d hear ‘Oxygene’ by Jean-Michel Jarre when we’d go to the London Planetarium, it would be on if you were waiting to go in. So [at home] we’d use those kinds of experiences – we’d use a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and – I mean, we were very little, it was very silly – we’d write a type of sci-fi script with ‘Oxygene’ playing in the background as our soundtrack.

My relationship with sound was affected by certain things growing up. My grandad and my dad were – and my dad still is – bellringers, which I think is a hugely underrated discipline. We rightly praise the Aurora Orchestra playing things by heart – I went to see them do The Rite of Spring by heart [at Saffron Hall in 2023] and it was absolutely mindblowing, they deserve all the credit for that – but bellringers do that every weekend, three hours or more of memorised mathematical permutations while handling these unwieldly bells. If we’re going to be patriotic about something, I feel like that’s something to be proud about, because it’s unusual and it’s such a skill.  

With bellringing, there are these interesting patterns, but also these slight irregularities because it’s not mechanised – there are people doing this, and there are also these spatial qualities of sound that you get when you hear it resonating in a ringing chamber. With the tunings, you get these harmonics, these overtones, and sometimes they seem to vibrate or clash.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s that way that bells can sound slightly off-key, which you sometimes get with distance and echo. Do you have perfect pitch, then?

JOANNA WYLD:

No, and actually, I suspect my relationship with tuning is a little bit strange because I grew up with this sense of music being a little more fluid, not necessarily fitting within these strict parameters we’re used to thinking about in terms of pitch. And I suspect that then influenced my love for composition and contemporary and 20th century music later, made me open to it, because I’d grown up with this variety of sounds, without that sense of hierarchy about it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And did you do some bellringing yourself?

JOANNA WYLD:

I did learn for a short while, but then I had an experience where a rope hit me – it is quite dangerous. My dad was there, and he grabbed it and it was fine… but I was a bit put off by that. Also, I don’t think I’ve got the mathematical brain to do all the actual methods, but I love the sound of it. It could almost be rebranded as mindfulness. If you listen, it’s got enough patterns to keep your brain interested – but it’s also quite mesmerising. I think, I hope, there is a new generation of people coming through who can do it. It’s in the category of things like dry-stone walling… almost like folk traditions. These things deserve to be continued in the least jingoistic way, just because they are interesting and skilful.

I have a CD called Church Bells of England, which is an incredibly sexy thing to own, and it has all these examples of ringing in various places. None of them are perfect in terms of the ringing or the sound quality, but they give a sense of what’s hypnotic about it. The example from St Giles, Cripplegate launches straight into these complex patterns, it’s so absorbing. And then you have composers who’ve drawn on this, from William Byrd’s emulation of change-ringing in keyboard music, to Jonathan Harvey’s wonderful Mortuous Plango, Vivos Voco, which samples the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral. I heard it played during a London Sinfonietta concert and you felt like you were surrounded by the recording of the bell, it was a visceral experience.

——

JOANNA WYLD:

Classical music came in when we were in the car, we’d put cassettes on, and I did discover then that I really loved this music. This would have been from the age of about eight onwards… that’s when I started to play the flute.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The exact age I started too, actually. Why did you pick the flute, then?

JOANNA WYLD:

Well, it was slightly by default, because in my primary school, which was very tiny, you could learn the piano, the violin or the flute. There were three teachers who came in, and I had more of a yearning to learn the clarinet, but it wasn’t really possible. It just wasn’t very practical – this is before we got our piano. My older brother had been learning to play the violin, so I kind of ended up on the flute because that was what was available. I mean, it took ages to get a note out of it, but it wasn’t a burning ambition to learn that particular instrument.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yeah, I think I wanted to play the violin, but I have a feeling my parents couldn’t have coped with the idea there’d be at least three years of scraping. I seem to remember we were watching something on TV, there was someone playing the violin absolutely brilliantly, and I recall saying something like, ‘Oh I’d love to be able to do that’, and it all went very quiet in the room. So maybe that was a clue. I think with the flute, I think I liked it as a colour in an ensemble, rather than as a solo instrument. I did enjoy playing but I found solo playing quite stressful – and also I felt a bit alienated in my teens because I did want to be in bands, but I had no idea how you went about that. I learned the saxophone for a while, and that got me into bands a bit. But I told this story on a podcast recently – when I got into university, I did a music degree for a year, but obviously in the college orchestra you could only really have three flautists in there. You couldn’t really have fifteen.

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, if you’ve got too many flutes, what do you do? I was really lucky because I grew up near the Bromley Youth Music Trust, a music hub that offers affordable music ensembles, so I grew up in a concert band system, and that’s how they deal with instruments where there are too many for a standard orchestra. That was quite a discipline in terms of ensemble playing. And so I ended up in this concert band where we’d tour and do competitions and it was quite high level, but it was a brilliant exercise in eclectic music, because in concerts you’d have stuff written for it specifically, often quite contemporary and imaginative. And then you’ve got arrangements of pop, film and classical – so a lovely kind of cross section. Music for concert band and brass band is another genre that’s oddly underrated I think. I love the ‘Overture’ from Björk’s Selma Songs (don’t watch Dancer in the Dark, it’s traumatising, but listen to the soundtrack), it’s a lovely example of rich brass writing. And the song that pairs with it, ‘New World’, is gorgeous, very powerful.

And then in the sixth form, I got into the BYMT symphony orchestra having sort of worked my way through. That was a huge experience, and I was just so lucky, because we were playing quite high-level repertoire: Britten’s ‘Four Sea Interludes’, and Bernstein’s ‘On the Waterfront’, and Dvořák symphonies, Sibelius symphonies… We played Mahler, you know! I became immersed in all this. And our teachers were phenomenal because they expected these really high standards of us, and we were living up to them. This was a lot of state-school educated people, and we were so lucky to have this affordable opportunity to make music like that. Then at university, I was exposed to more 20th century and contemporary and started to play things like the Berio ‘Sequenza’ and Messiaen’s ‘Le merle noir’, stuff which uses more kind of percussive and unusual sounds on the flute.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Tell me about Richard Strauss, who you mentioned to me was a particularly important composer you heard at a formative age.

JOANNA WYLD:

It’s his ‘Four Last Songs’ [composed in 1948] in particular. I think, for GCSE or A level music, I had heard his ‘Morgen!’ [‘Tomorrow!’]. Back in the day, CDs were quite expensive and I wasn’t buying them lots. My birthday or Christmas was coming up and so I asked my parents for Strauss’s ‘Morgen!’. They couldn’t find that on record in our local record shop so they gave me this instead – a happy accident.

I love all of the music on that record for different reasons – you’ve also got ‘Death and Transfiguration’, [a tone poem written in 1888–89] when Strauss was quite a young man, and which in many ways is not really about death but is more life-affirming, though it’s dramatic. Whereas with the ‘Four Last Songs’ everything’s stripped back, because he did tend towards bombast and vulgarity at times, and these were written when he was really facing death. They’re just four of the most beautiful things ever written. The third one in particular [‘When Falling Asleep’] just has this incredible climactic moment and wonderful violin solo. And in the final song [‘At Sunset’], you get this pair of piccolos which are the birds representing the two souls of him and his wife, off into the ether – it’s just so beautiful.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And ‘At Sunset’ quotes a little motif from ‘Death and Transfiguration’, doesn’t it, at one point?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, and there’s a horn solo at the end of [the second song] ‘September’ – his father was a very celebrated horn player. And through him, he’d been to hear lots of premieres of Wagner operas because his father was playing in them, and his father tried to discourage his interest in Wagner! [laughs] Anyway, so you feel as though that horn solo might have been just a nice little valedictory kind of farewell to that memory of his father as well.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I know you particularly love this specific recording of the ‘Four Last Songs’, with Gundula Janowitz singing and Herbert von Karajan conducting [first released in 1974], but I take it you know who else was a fan of it as well?

JOANNA WYLD:

David Bowie [which inspired him to write four songs for his Heathen album]. Yes, I love this fact. I’m kind of thrilled that it’s that specific recording, with Janowitz – because people are divided as to which is the best. Strauss is one of those people, like Mahler, where I have different recordings of their works because I do think people can bring something different in. But yeah, I just love the fact that Bowie loved the same recording as I do!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Bowie’s influences just seem to come from so many places. We’re back to eclectic again, as with you.

JOANNA WYLD:

I think I’m discerning about quality, but there isn’t a hierarchy of genres. Obviously, classical is my speciality, and I’m passionate about it, but it’s all there to be enjoyed, we’re complex human beings, and Bowie obviously recognised that. I understand why people specialise, but I love to embrace variety.

——

FIRST: QUEEN: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’/ ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’ (EMI Records, cassette single, 1991)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was first released in 1975 when I was five, and I vividly remember the video on Top of the Pops. It’s hard to remember what the world was like before this record, because it is one of the first that’s seared into my mind.

JOANNA WYLD:

And this reissue was the first record that I can remember wanting to buy. I was eleven. I heard it on the radio. It was just unlike anything else I’d ever heard. But it’s got that context of originally coming out in the mid-seventies when there was the mainstream three-minute pop song and at the same time there was prog: people yodelling or a synth solo, sometimes quite self-indulgent. But here you’ve got something that’s both: it’s mainstream adjacent and also proggy – it’s an extended idea and a concept. I just thought it was really fun, kind of dramatic and extraordinary. And that appealed.

It wasn’t that long afterwards that Wayne’s World (1992) cemented it as well. But for me it also represents a couple of things I generally find interesting about music. One: it’s the victim of its own success – as you said, you can’t imagine it not being there. Even those who don’t like it, couldn’t imagine it not being there. That’s an extraordinary achievement. And that can lead to it becoming ubiquitous and taken for granted, almost an irritant.

A parallel for me would be Holst’s Planets suite. I fell into the same trap with that – I’d just heard it so many times. And then at university, I finally got to play in it. And I realised: this is so well written, so well orchestrated, and this would have been incredibly original at the time. And it has been emulated a lot since, but I hadn’t given it enough credit for what it was, when it was written.

The other aspect of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ I find interesting: it’s so of the person who wrote it. Some composers have that instantly recognisable fingerprint. Holst is one, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Copland, more recently Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi, both separately and together as Knower, – and I think Freddie Mercury is another, in this song. It’s him, just going, ‘I’m not going to worry about what anyone else thinks, I’m not going to draw on lots of other influences, this is what I want to write.’ I admire anyone who can do that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There are aspects of it that remain mysterious, like nobody has ever quite nailed what it is really about. Brilliantly, someone has put up clips of Kenny Everett actually playing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time, on his weekend lunchtime show on Capital Radio in 1975 – have you heard this?

JOANNA WYLD:

No, but he championed it, didn’t he? I haven’t done a deep dive, I have to admit.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I only found it the other day. Seems he had been playing extracts from it, and then he plays the whole thing.

Kenny Everett, Capital Radio, c. October 1975

We had this song in our house because it’s on their album A Night at the Opera, which has this ambitious mix of quite whimsical, almost music-hall songs, and then out-and-out rock tracks. I still think it’s probably their best record. I like to hear it as part of the album. As you just said with The Planets, it’s good to go back and play it in context.

But even with Kenny Everett’s support, it’s still really weird they put this out as the single, in a way. And obviously, you bought this re-release after Freddie Mercury had just died [24 November 1991]. How aware were you of that event?

JOANNA WYLD:

I think this was the first experience I had of a celebrity death having an impact, and of feeling incredibly sad. The AA side, ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’, is just incredibly poignant. I can’t watch the video where he sort of says ‘I love you’ at the end. It’s just so, so heartbreaking. I think for a lot of people, it really brought home the reality of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. That this wonderful larger-than-life figure, famous and well-off and all the rest of it, had been hit by it. I don’t remember the extent to which I understood everything at that point in my life, but it definitely stayed with me. It felt like such a horrible shock and a horrible loss. 

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Until I was doing the research for this, I’d forgotten it was a charity single, for the Terrence Higgins Trust. Since when it’s been in so many other things – Wayne’s World as you mentioned, but just this summer, in September, at the Last Night of the Proms.

JOANNA WYLD:

The Prom was a lot of fun. I know it divided opinion a little bit, but it’s nice to celebrate people while they’re alive. I think Brian May and Roger Taylor deserve that moment. While I’m not the biggest Queen fan, and I don’t listen to the music loads, they do all seem fundamentally decent, and those remaining members have really championed Freddie’s memory and always mention him. There’s something quite loving there.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wanted to talk to you about writing liner notes for CD releases and programme notes for concerts, because that’s something you’ve been doing for many years. How did you first get into this sort of work?

JOANNA WYLD:

The first clue lies back in my childhood. We’d play classical music in the car, and one cassette we had was Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals suite [composed 1886, but only published posthumously in 1922], featuring lots of quite kid-friendly stuff. And when I went to secondary school, my first music assignment was to write the description of a piece of music. I remember spending ages on this, being so enthused by it. I went home, read the sleevenotes of Carnival of the Animals, got my little dictionary of music, did a bit of research and wrote it up. It was like a prototype for what I’d do later. It was just a Year 7 essay, I was about eleven, it wasn’t hugely in-depth, but it’s interesting that’s stuck with me as a memory – an early enjoyment of writing about music showed up.

But how I got into it professionally… I was working at a record company, originally called ASV, which also had some peripheral labels: Gaudeamus was an early music label, Black Box was a contemporary music label, everything on White Line was sort of middle of the road, like light music, and then Living Era was the nostalgia label. This was my first job after university, and I was the editorial assistant.

For Living Era, we used to get these liner notes written on a typewriter by these lovely old gents who were jazz experts, some of them virtually contemporary with the songs they were writing about! They were delightful to work with, but one day we were missing a liner note, and my boss said, ‘This person just forgot to file this copy and we really need it now. Can you cobble something together?’ And this was in the days before there was a huge amount on the Internet about these things. I think I used early Wikipedia. But because I’d edited and proofread so many of these notes already, I knew the style. So I was able to emulate that slightly chatty nostalgic style, as well as getting the information in. I knocked this out quite quickly and my boss was quite impressed, which was nice, and then asked me to do more and more bits of writing.

And then ASV got bought out by Sanctuary Records, which had all these associated metal artists – so you’d go into the canteen and Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden would be there, and they’d have Kerrang! TV on. We had a meeting interrupted because Robert Plant was in reception. It was very glamorous, quite fun – I loved it, and I got to meet some really interesting people.

But all this meant that later, still in the heyday of CD production, particularly in classical music, I was hired to do a lot of freelance writing. There was a lot of repackaging – essentially getting older recordings and repackaging them as ‘The Best of Poulenc’ or whoever it was – and new labels were being set up. So I was asked to churn out quite a lot of essays for them, and quite quickly built up a body of work. The hardest commission was when my daughter was only a couple of months old, when I was asked to do 17 liner notes in two and a half weeks, so I was a machine for that period. It was something like one essay a day. And obviously I was looking after a small child!

Then I started to get emails from various people – the BBC, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and others: ‘We’ve noticed your writing, we like it, would you like to send me some examples.’ And it’s slowly built from there.

I would say I’m a generalist. I’m not someone who’s done a PhD in a specific area, I always treat myself as someone who’s not really an expert, but I will do the research when I’m writing a programme note, as thoroughly as possible, as is relevant for that programme note, but I’m always kind of standing on the shoulders of people who’ve done that in-depth research. But equally, I’m trying to bring my perspective, and the way I hear it and write about it, hopefully I can bring some joy to people’s listening experience. 

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And you got to write about new commissions as well, is that right?

JOANNA WYLD:

One that was really nice – it was a premiere performance – was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s ‘Owl Songs’ as a tribute to Oliver Knussen (1952–2018). It was a real privilege to write about that because I’d met Oliver Knussen a couple of times, an absolute gem of a man and composer. His music is just these crystalline jewels of orchestral beauty, and I’d recommend something like ‘Flourish with Fireworks’ (1988) to anyone who thinks contemporary music’s a bit alienating. So he mentored Mark-Anthony Turnage who I’ve also since interviewed, and Olly was known affectionately as Big Owl – particularly Mark referred to him in that affectionate way. So the Owl Songs are these wonderful tributes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Are you adhering to house style with these things, or do they tend to leave you alone?

JOANNA WYLD:

There’s very little editorial interference, actually, which is lovely. And I’ve built up trust with a number of commissioners, which is great. What has changed in the style of writing for these sorts of things is it used to be much more academic, much closer to my university essays. The expectation would be that your audience would be aficionados – but it was a lot drier. Actually it’s much more fun now, because the emphasis is on something more inviting and accessible that could be read by anyone, and if you do something more technical, you just explain it in passing. You try and make it as enjoyable as possible to read and that has been fun because I can bring out my own personality a bit more, and feel freer to illuminate what’s exciting about the music.

I feel very strongly that we tend to present classical music as very polite, elegant and smooth, and it can be all of those things, but it can also be… terrifying, for example. Like with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, I get palpitations – it’s visceral, it’s filthy. Or Richard Strauss, which can be, to be blunt, very sexual – and I think people almost need permission to hear it in that way because they think classical is ‘all very nice’, and actually… he was a bit of a perv, you know? And if that sort of thing’s there, it’s pointless to not draw people towards that way of listening or bringing out the enjoyment of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Why do you think then that happened to classical music, that the politeness of it became paramount? Is it because of how it was taught, or presented?

JOANNA WYLD:

Every possible experience you have had is all there in classical music somewhere. These are very complex people writing it, and often that’s what I enjoy exploring – their personality, their quirks, their flaws, and the rest of it.

I mean, this is a huge topic – people have done PhDs on this – but in terms of how we receive it… the Victorians have a fair bit to answer for. You know, the idea of the Opera House: people had previously been there as an everyday experience, and then it became this hierarchy of ‘who sits where’, and then obviously with different genres, you have this shift – music that was contemporary becoming historical, and then becoming classical, so it’s no longer immediate. Whereas pop music is obviously reflecting people now. So with anything historical, you can end up with this sheen of respectability and this sense of it being a museum piece, something that you have to treat with reverence.

It’s really complicated but yes, definitely the way it’s taught, even the way it’s marketed… the way even people who love classical music sometimes talk about it… it can be quite reverential, and there are bits of it that are of course sublime. But there’s plenty else in there, and it’s almost just encouraging people to go and hear it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So how do you strike a balance between musicology and biography when you’re writing these?

JOANNA WYLD:

There used to be more of an emphasis on musicology – perhaps the structure of a piece of music could go into a bit of detail – whereas now I tend to start with biography and history and set the scene. I try and give a bit of historical context and wherever possible bring out the interesting details about that composer that are relevant to that piece. And if possible, quotes – direct quotes are really interesting. If I can find them, if they’re reliable, just from letters or whatever, because that just tells you so much about them.

We were told at university: You mustn’t let the biography of a composer influence the way the music is interpreted too heavily. I think that’s fair, particularly from an academic perspective – that you are not there to try and tell a story through every single score. And if you’re trying to look at it on its own terms, musically, you do need to separate the two, but for a concert-going or a CD-listening experience, it brings the music to life, stops it being a museum piece. Because you realise these human beings were just as complicated as we are, and often just funny, or grumpy or whatever. Then I might go into some musical detail, and if I’ve got space, try and do a bit of a listening guide, try and draw out some highlights, some things to listen out for.

Occasionally I’ll do a deep dive, find something that isn’t widely known, or almost gives people permission to think of those composers in a slightly different way. For example, JS Bach’s ‘Musical Offering’ (1747). With Bach, he’s so revered we tend to deify him, and talk about him in reverential tones. But the story behind that piece is so fascinating. I did a lot of research from a non-classical perspective, like reading a bit of Gödel, Escher, Bach [by the US scientist Douglas Hofstadter, published 1979], and stuff about mathematical patterns. But with that piece, you also had family dynamics going on – his son [CPE Bach] was working for Frederick [the Great, King Frederick II of Prussia] who commissioned this piece, but they laid down the gauntlet in the most provocative way by saying, ‘Oh, improvise a fugue in six parts’ and no-one had ever really done that. He managed a three-part improvisation and then went away – and it was as though he had a fit of pique, producing this ridiculously vast response to this challenge, creating something out of this deliberately difficult and angular theme. And none of this that I included was new, but it was quite nice to bring out those aspects. Especially with someone like Bach who obviously had great faith and appears to be very holy… that composition came from a bit of anger and irritation.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, bringing composers to life as human beings without overemphasising to the detriment of the work. I’m sure it’s changed in school-teaching now, back stories are brought up more. I had good music teachers at school, but I don’t ever remember being taught about these composers’ lives, which now feels really weird. Or even the wider history of the time.

JOANNA WYLD:

It’s like Beethoven was a young carer, effectively. His dad descended into alcoholism after his mother’s death, so he was caring for his siblings, which prevented him from staying in Vienna to study with Mozart, which he really wanted to do. Information like that is really humanising, especially as Beethoven was perhaps the first in the 19th century to be regarded as ‘in touch with the divine’, and really cast that long shadow.

I would probably say I’m not a musicologist like, say, Leah Broad [FLA 28], but I’d call myself a music historian. The history of it is fascinating, and it helps people to get closer to the music because they realise these were normal people who might have been incredibly gifted but also worked really hard. Again, Bach was one of those people, who said, Anyone who works as hard as me can do the same thing. Which is not entirely true, but nor was he sitting there on a cloud, you know, being a genius.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I mentioned this in the Leah Broad chat, about hearing Radio 3 say in passing about how Felix Mendelssohn essentially revived JS Bach’s music around 1830 – it had hardly been played for about eighty years after Bach’s death.

JOANNA WYLD:

It had really gone out of fashion, it’s sort of staggering. Although Mozart and Beethoven had studied Bach, and actually the sort of contrapuntal depth they learnt from him is one thing that elevates their music above the more lightweight stuff of the time. So his influence was still there at key moments, although in terms of performance it wasn’t until Mendelssohn revived it.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Something else I discovered from your website: you’ve been a librettist. Can you tell me about your work with Robert Hugill?

JOANNA WYLD:

That was a wonderful opportunity. A friend put us in touch. It was called ‘The Gardeners’. Robert had read this article about a family of gardeners in the Middle East, tending war graves, and it was intergenerational. So he had this idea, it was his conception, of how the generations relate to each other, and the old man of the three generations could hear the dead. So there was that metaphysical aspect to it, and so we had a chorus of the dead, and the youngest is quite a rebellious character. All of this was fictionalised – this isn’t based on the article – and it was a chamber opera, so it’s not huge scale, but it unfolded as a sort of family drama. Ultimately, the old man dies, whereupon the youngest man inherits his ability to hear the dead. Meantime, you’ve got the women of the family trying to keep the peace. So it’s a family drama with a metaphysical aspect. We performed it a couple of times, which was amazing, firstly at the Conway Hall and then at the Garden Museum with a wonderful cast.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is it about trying to find words that sound good as well as have meaning? When you’re writing something like that, does it become clear what doesn’t belong? Do you have a working method for something like that?

JOANNA WYLD:

I definitely think it helps that my Masters was in Composition. And I’ve set a lot of words myself. So I know the kind of thing I would set, and it’s not always the choice you might expect. It has to be something where the words lend themselves to musical treatment. Which often means there’s a rhythmic lilt to them – you’re thinking of the words rhythmically, but also making sure they don’t obstruct the music. So if it’s really overly polysyllabic and flowery, that’s going to get in the way, and it becomes about the words, not the music. But there’s also how the words sit next to each other – I remember reading a wonderful letter from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath about the choice of two words in one of her poems. It was two quite punchy words next to each other, and I think he suggested weighting them differently but also talking about them as if they were physical objects. I relate to that. So when I’m writing something like that, and I’m not saying it’s on that level, I try and think in terms of the weight of the words, and how they’ll then sit in someone’s mouth.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Because just as there’s a musicality in music itself, there’s a musicality in words too, so you’ve got to match the two up. Do you still write music yourself, as well?

JOANNA WYLD:

I’ve written a couple of songs with bands I’ve been in, I enjoyed that. I had a really lovely teacher at university, Robert Saxton, but you really have to pursue it, you have to be so obsessed with it, and I also realised I’m probably better at writing about music than writing music.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What sort of music were you writing for the bands you’ve been in?

JOANNA WYLD:

One song started out as a sort of Hot Chip parody really, almost like a joke – and then I added some influences from LCD Soundsystem; it’s quite a fun track, which we once played at a wedding, and a conga formed, which was one of the biggest compliments.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s brilliant.

JOANNA WYLD:

And then I’ve written a sort of cathartic song called ‘Prufrock’, where I drew on TS Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So you were singing these?

JOANNA WYLD:

Yeah. Another one was called ‘The Air’ which was my attempt at layering stuff together in a sort of Brian Wilson fashion.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And what were your bands called? Were you gigging?

JOANNA WYLD:

One was called Fake Teak, and we recorded ‘Prufrock’. It’s my brother’s band, named after the equipment that our dad had when we were growing up. That’s now evolved into something called Music Research Unit, which is a similar line-up, but more fluid and with new songs. We had our first rehearsal just yesterday! Then I’m in another band called Dawn of the Squid, and I don’t write for them, and they’re hard to describe, but they’re kind of… indie-folk, and there’s comedy in there.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is this out there to hear?

JOANNA WYLD:

There’s a new Dawn of the Squid album, which I didn’t play on, I can’t take any credit, but that’s out. There’s quite a bit of Fake Teak on Spotify. I play synthesisers and flute in these groups, and to go back to what we were discussing earlier – about sounds not being strictly in tune – what I find lovely about some synthesisers is they feel much closer to acoustic instruments; they can go out of tune, and you can make unpleasant as well as pleasant noises on them. I play this instrument sometimes called an ARP Odyssey [analogue synthesiser introduced in 1972] and it can go out of tune on stage, it’s a real rarity, and it’s been used in loads of pop like Ultravox. But I have had gigs where it’s gone a bit out of tune, and in a weird way I kind of enjoyed that more than digital instruments where it’s got presets and everything’s tidy, because it feels much closer to my experience of other instruments.

—–

LAST: THE UNTHANKS: Diversions, Vol. 4: The Songs and Poems of Molly Drake (2017, RabbleRouser Music)

Extract: ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’

JOANNA WYLD:

I’m not a folk expert, I’m getting into it more, but like a lot of people, I came to this because I heard Unthanks do the ‘Magpie’ song on Detectorists. Then I went to a concert, locally, on the strength of that, and that’s where they performed some of these Molly Drake songs. I loved the whole concert – one of my prevailing memories of it is my crying my contact lens out during one of the Molly Drake songs, and just having to sit there with it in my palm, kind of half-blind.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

These songs are amazing to hear because we know so much, or at least we think we do, about Nick Drake’s life, but obviously the Molly Drake archive hasn’t been pored over by scholars too much. I think most of these songs are from the Fifties, and the Unthanks have covered them, apparently, because they wanted to make better quality recordings. And the Molly Drake versions are out there too. But there’s something about these songs that are both public creativity – as in the Drake family being aware of these songs – and private creativity too as it wasn’t out in the public domain for years. And you keep having to remind yourself that these songs were written before Nick Drake got into music himself, not afterwards. 

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, so many women composers are talked of in relation to their male relative, but you’re right that she was doing this first. It clearly influenced Nick Drake, and the almost painful shyness is a clear link, so it illuminates his music, which I also love, but I think on its own terms Molly’s music is phenomenal and yet, incredible that she was so shy that I think her husband bought her a reel-to-reel and set her up in a room on her own with it. He recognised her talent so there was this idea of ‘Let’s get this down for posterity’, but there was no concept in her mind that anyone would ever hear it, which seems really alien to us now, but there’s a real beauty to that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I think there can be a pressure when you’re writing something that you know is going to be for public consumption in some way. But I found a great Rachel Unthank quote:

‘Her work shares her son’s dark introspection, but in Molly we get a clearer sense of how those who understand depths of despair can do so only by understanding happiness and joy too. Through Molly’s work, we see the soulful, enigmatic lonesomeness as a person who is also a member of a loving and fun-loving family.’

I think that’s really important because Nick Drake – and his work – tends to be defined by what happened to him, and not all of him and his work is like that. I mean, the Molly song that feels like it could have been written in response to his early death – ‘Do You Ever Remember?’ – was written much earlier.

JOANNA WYLD:

You mentioned family, but obviously on the Unthanks recording, you’ve also got Gabrielle Drake reciting the poetry. I went to the Nick Drake Prom, with the Unthanks performing with Gabrielle Drake, which was phenomenally moving – and brave of her as well, I thought. And it’s a rich combination to listen to – you’ve got the sugared almond sound of the Unthanks’ voices, and the woodier timbre of her delivery. The whole thing really cuts to your heart, similar to Nick Drake, but it’s even less crowded in metaphor, it cuts to the heart with a deceptive simplicity. The first track, ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’, has one of those melodies that feels like it’s always existed, and then this tremendous bit of poetry. I really admire people who can pick and use very few words to convey something. I was lucky enough to interview Michael Morpurgo many years ago, and he blew my mind in terms of how to write. He used to say, ‘We don’t need to teach kids lots of florid words, but to be direct.’ That lyrical and nuanced but straightforward vocabulary can be more powerful and it’s something I aspire to, [but] I don’t always find it easy.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I feel the same way. As an editor and sometime writer, I find that writing a simple sentence is actually quite hard.

JOANNA WYLD:

The poem I was going to mention at the end of ‘What Can a Song Do to You?’: ‘Does it remind you of a time when you were sad? (So in other words, why? Why is this person crying?) Does it remind you of the time when you were sad? Ah, no. But it reminds me of a time when I could be. It reminds me of a time when I could be…

And I sort of think that’s… mindblowing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That particular song has been going around my head for the last few days. Going back to what you were saying with Detectorists making you aware of Unthanks, film and TV does seem to be a major way for people to connect with people now. I sometimes look at the streaming stats for tracks at random, wonder how that’s become the biggest thing, and it’s nearly always some film or TV programme I wasn’t aware of.

JOANNA WYLD:

I guess it’s a route in. I recognise this with classical music as well – I’m lucky enough to have grown up with enough that I’ve absorbed bits and learned about it, done my degrees in it. If I hadn’t done that, that might be my way in as well. And as I don’t have that background with folk song – I like the genre in a broad sense, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking. There’s too much out there, and there are playlists but they can be a bit too rambling.

——

ANYTHING: THE CARDINALL’S MUSICK / ANDREW CARWOOD / DAVID SKINNER: Cornysh, Turges, Prentes: Latin Church Music (1997, Gaudeamus/ASV Records)

Extract: William Cornysh: ‘Salve Regina’

JOANNA WYLD:

This ties a few things together. This is the William Cornysh recording of ‘Salve Regina’, which is my favourite work on that album, but it’s on the Gaudeamus label which I mentioned earlier. I worked with some of the people on that label, but I also know about this repertoire because I was lucky enough at university to study early music with David Skinner, who’s one of the two founders of The Cardinall’s Musick [the other being Andrew Carwood]. They’ve since gone in different directions and David now conducts [a consort] called Alamire. So this is going back a bit, but it was through that university experience that I got to hear this. It’s funny – we were talking about church music earlier but this is English Catholic music of the Tudor era and it’s sad to me that the Catholic Church in this country doesn’t have that kind of choral tradition because we’ve got these riches but for some reason it’s not performed in that church context very often, but nor is it often sung in the concert hall either. Slightly later you get Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, in the Elizbaethan era, that gets mentioned a bit more. But for some reason the Eton Choir Book doesn’t get as much attention and I think it deserves it, so I thought it might be quite fun to bring that in. Because particularly with the Cornysh ‘Salve Regina’, it’s incredible.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In fact, I’ve got a quote from David Skinner here, from the 1990s: Henry VIII had destroyed most of the musical manuscripts and he says ‘there are literally only two of the choir books I worked from when originally there would have been hundreds.’

JOANNA WYLD:

Yes, Lambeth is the other one, I think?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

He mentions the Eton Choir Book, and the other was Caius?

JOANNA WYLD:

I will have to check my facts because the history of this area is so complex!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m glad you said that! I merely skimmed this, and it felt quite complicated!

JOANNA WYLD:

Really complicated, and I’m sure some of the complexities of how it was written have gone out of the window for me… I learned them a long time ago. I do, very geekily, have a facsimile copy of the Eton Choir Book. I occasionally try and follow along, and it’s quite tricky to follow because instead of it being arranged in score, you’ve got the four parts written separately.

But when I heard the ‘Salve Regina’ at university, it stuck out for me. It’s incredibly beautiful, it takes a bit of time to get into the language and it’s interesting to me that a lot of people who love early music and love contemporary music overlap because early music predates a lot of ‘the rules’ that dominate so much of Western music. With this piece, it’s like you’re walking through a cathedral, meandering, just wandering, but then you get these cadences or these chords, very vivid moments, that feel like light coming through stained glass. And it’s quite a long piece, but right at the end, it just builds and builds up to that high note, which then drops down, and then you have these glorious last two chords. At that point, it’s almost like you’re at the rose window… Even if you’re not religious, music does reflect every facet of who we are, and spirituality is one facet of who we are as human beings. So it’s powerful even if we don’t specifically believe in something. It’s a sense of time travel. It takes you out of yourself and takes you back, but it also kind of elevates as well.

———–

JOANNA WYLD:

At school, I don’t recall learning much pop at all. It wasn’t that I wasn’t exposed to it, but in terms of my actual education, the emphasis was on the history of Western music, classical and symphonic music and so on. My daughter did have to analyse pop – I remember Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ being one example. I’ve been a primary school teacher, and I do remember teaching some Stevie Wonder because any excuse, I absolutely love Stevie Wonder, but it was Black History Month and so I brought in his songs about social history, and they all knew ‘Happy Birthday’ but we could talk about how that brought in Martin Luther King Day, which was a lovely way of giving the pupils a sense of the impact music can have.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Interesting that they knew the song, it’s not one of his you hear that often now.

JOANNA WYLD:

They all knew the chorus, when I sang that bit, they knew that, but they didn’t know the verses or the lyrics so they just thought of it as generic. It’s not my favourite Stevie song – I’ve got so many – but it’s an example of how powerful music can be.

———

You can find out more about Joanna, and her work, at her website, Notes Upon Notes: https://www.notes-upon-notes.com

You can follow her on Bluesky at @joannawyld.bsky.social.

Also, find out more about Dawn of the Squid at their website: https://dawnofthesquid.co.uk

—–

FLA PLAYLIST 32

Joanna Wyld

For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Thanks to Tune My Music, you can also transfer this playlist to the platform or site of your choice by using this link: https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/QWjXV28T8E

Track 1:

THE BEATLES: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT4pwRi2JmY&list=RDXT4pwRi2JmY&start_radio=1

Track 2:

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE: ‘Oxygène, Part IV’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PycXs9LpEM&list=RD_PycXs9LpEM&start_radio=1

Track 3:

ST GILES, CRIPPLEGATE BELL RINGING TEAM: ‘Cambridge Surprise Maximus’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8rwhJHt9Ds&list=RDo8rwhJHt9Ds&start_radio=1

Track 4:

JONATHAN HARVEY: ‘Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T-H-fVlHE0&list=RD0T-H-fVlHE0&start_radio=1

Track 5:

BJÖRK: ‘Overture’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k4xT0qjUW4&list=RD6k4xT0qjUW4&start_radio=1

Track 6:

BJÖRK: ‘New World’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNma-h_urvs&list=RDeNma-h_urvs&start_radio=1

Track 7:

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: ‘On the Waterfront Suite’

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4isx_tGYwM&list=RDt4isx_tGYwM&start_radio=1

Track 8:

OLIVIER MESSIAEN: ‘Le merle noir’:

Emmanuel Pahud, Eric Le Sage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT8MQpg7oTo&list=RDhT8MQpg7oTo&start_radio=1

Track 9:

RICHARD STRAUSS: ‘4 Letzte Lieder [Four Last Songs], TrV 296: No. 3: Beim Schlafengehen’:

Gundula Janowitz, Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5n0DqFlpMY&list=RDt5n0DqFlpMY&start_radio=1

Track 10:

QUEEN: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG16sdjLtc0&list=RDxG16sdjLtc0&start_radio=1

Track 11:

LOUIS COLE, METROPOLE ORKEST, JULES BUCKLEY: ‘Shallow Laughter: Bitches – orchestral version’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEmMAG4C1BE&list=RDbEmMAG4C1BE&start_radio=1

Track 12:

AARON COPLAND: ’12 Poems of Emily Dickinson: No. 10: I’ve Heard An Organ Talk Sometimes’:

Susan Chilcott, Iain Burnside:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvKLlCf2TWE&list=RDSvKLlCf2TWE&start_radio=1

Track 13:

OLIVER KNUSSEN: ‘Flourish with Fireworks, op. 22: Tempo giusto e vigoroso – Molto vivace’:

London Sinfonietta:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLkTfXPC-TU&list=RDwLkTfXPC-TU&start_radio=1

Track 14:

IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘The Rite of Spring, Part 1: V. Games of the Rival Tribes’:

Seiji Ozawa, Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiAr76Qs8WY&list=RDXiAr76Qs8WY&start_radio=1

Track 15:

IGOR STRAVINSKY: ‘The Rite of Spring, Part 1: VI. Procession of the Sage’:

Seiji Ozawa, Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBog5Tej2I&list=PL-XNw6p4EDBv7-H-z2Vo_c3sB3rvIxt7-&index=6

Track 16:

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: ‘Musical Offering, BWV 1079: Ricercar a 6 – Clavecin’:

Pierre Hantaï:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K07rF5xOvQ 

Track 17:

FAKE TEAK: ‘Prufrock’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-1prkhHjU&list=RDL5-1prkhHjU&start_radio=1

Track 18:

THE UNTHANKS: ‘What Can A Song Do to You?’

[Poem read by Gabrielle Drake]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzqb_78LUkI&list=RDJzqb_78LUkI&start_radio=1

Track 19:

WILLIAM CORNYSH: ‘Salve Regina’:

The Cardinall’s Musick, Andrew Carwood, David Skinner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQprxgtbk4E&list=RDpQprxgtbk4E&start_radio=1

Track 20:

STEVIE WONDER: ‘Happier Than the Morning Sun’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4PcSOLtf-U&list=RDS4PcSOLtf-U&start_radio=1

FLA 5: Fenella Humphreys (03/07/2022)

/ whenisbins / Leave a comment

(c) Matthew Johnson

Fenella Humphreys is one of the most acclaimed, technically dazzling and imaginative violinists in Britain. In 2018, she won the BBC Music Magazine Instrumental Award, and her performing and recording career has seen her playing a wide range of concertos, chamber music and solo work. She has collaborated with numerous other artists including the pianists Martin Roscoe, Peter Donohoe and Nicola Eimer, singers Sir John Tomlinson and Sir Willard White, the oboist Nicholas Daniel, and the conductor (and previous FLA guest) Lev Parikian.

She is committed not just to keeping the music alive of such established composers as JS Bach, Vaughan-Williams, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Paganini, but of championing new works – the many composers whose works she has premiered in her career include Sally Beamish, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Adrian Sutton and Cheryl Frances-Hoad. A typical concert of hers, and indeed a typical CD running order, will pinball between the past and the contemporary, to terrific effect, and her recordings regularly receive five-star reviews in the classical music press.

Fenella’s working schedule is almost as jaw-dropping as her playing, and so I consider myself very fortunate that she took time out to talk to me on First Last Anything about her music career. As well as discussing her choices, we talked about her working life as a contemporary musician, about the pros and cons of perfectionism, about how to practise music, about how the memory of music can survive ‘in one’s fingers’ – and about how lockdown changed her perception of concert audiences for the better.

I learned such a lot about music performance and interpretation in this conversation, and I hope you find it as interesting and enlightening as I did.  

 

—

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

My dad was a painter, an artist, he worked from home, and he listened to Radio 3 unless the cricket was on, in which case it was Test Match Special. For him, anything that wasn’t classical music was not music! He hated pop music, he hated anything else. He loved Mozart, he loved loads of later composers, but [for him] the best music was Bach – after Bach it went slightly downhill! But he had an enormous record collection, and he wanted me to listen seriously to classical music.

 

He was always giving me music to listen to. The first recording that really made an impression was the Britten Violin Concerto. I remember sitting in the car on the way to borrow a new violin from a trust, and listening to it, mind blown. It remains one of my favourite works to perform. He also used to take me to the Festival Hall, so that’s always a special place to be. Just that walk across the bridge from the Embankment to the South Bank, with him holding my hand, just the two of us. If life is being difficult, I will go and stand on that bridge – because there’s a sense of comfort standing there, with those memories.

 

But really from the beginning, he would sit me down at home, to play me something, and every week it was something different. Very occasionally, it was Shakespeare plays – but mostly it was music. And he was very much choosing the piece of music. For years, he wouldn’t let me listen to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto because he thought the music was so perfect, and he didn’t think I had the attention span or that I would understand it. He thought that I shouldn’t be allowed to destroy it for myself by listening to it when I wasn’t yet ready for it. It became almost a block for me – it was too perfect to go near. But when I learnt it, I thought, ‘It’s wonderful music – no question about that, but no more perfect than a lot of other pieces of music, it’s just a bit longer.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did it feel like, ‘Right, you’re ready for this piece, now you’re ready for that piece’?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

There was a bit of that. But with Beethoven, for my dad, that one work was on such a massive pedestal that he was scared to let me break it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I got a bit stuck with perfectionism, especially when I was young, and especially with playing music. That I could never be quite good enough.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Perfectionism makes me think about Mozart. When I was growing up, everybody would say how perfect he and his music was, all so beautiful and crystalline… and so I grew up thinking you couldn’t put a foot wrong with Mozart, and so I never played Mozart well. Then I had some coaching with [the conductor] Colin Davis, who had the absolute opposite attitude: Mozart was a human being. The characters in his operas have huge variety, and if you’re so trained on never being wrong and always being perfect, you can’t explore those characters. But also reading Mozart’s letters, you discover he was not this saintly, godly person… [Laughs] …quite the opposite. So, without that humanity, you’re never going to play it to the best of your ability, and certainly not to the best of the music’s ability. That was an amazing lesson to me, and it changed everything for me overnight when that happened.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How old would you have been when you had that epiphany, roughly?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Probably about eighteen or nineteen. It was brilliant to suddenly think, Oh, you’ve had it wrong all these years. Now you can go and enjoy playing Mozart! [Laughs]

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your latest CD recording, Caprices, was, I believe partly inspired by overcoming another block. That a violin teacher when you were younger told you that you ‘couldn’t’ play Paganini. Do you know why he said that?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

He was kind of old school. Once, four of us from school went on this amazing concert tour abroad, and we were discussing what repertoire we were taking. And when I said, ‘I really want to play this piece’, he said, ‘No, because people I know are going to hear you, and basically they’ll judge me on the way you play.’ That really knocked me – I spent the whole tour worrying that I was going to give my teacher a bad reputation, just by playing the violin. Which I find both shocking, that any teacher would say that to a student, but also funny, to be teaching with that attitude. So, with Paganini, I’d already been playing that with a previous teacher, but he didn’t think I was good enough. And then later, I did one Paganini caprice with him – and it was like pulling teeth. So, rather than just sucking it up and going away and practising, I stopped doing it. But I was perfectly good enough to be doing it – when I look at the other repertoire I was doing at the time. It wasn’t any different – it just didn’t have Paganini’s name attached to it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As I’m somebody who doesn’t play violin, can you explain what it is about Paganini that is so difficult, or at least is seen as so difficult?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

He built such a name for himself, and became world famous by being such an extraordinary virtuoso, and having this amazing stage presence, like a rock star. It wasn’t that nobody did technically difficult stuff prior to him – because they did – but maybe not quite in the same way for a while. The thing is, it’s a very specific show-off technique, and his caprices really are the pinnacle of that sort of virtuoso work. There are great virtuoso works from people like Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908), later on, but there’s certainly not anyone from Paganini’s era who’s remained in our knowledge of that history. Paganini’s still a household name, and none of the violinists who followed him were. So there’s that massive spotlight shone on him, for very good reasons.

 

When you think about works like Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto [composed 1878], which comes a bit later, which was seen as unplayable by the person it was written for, Leopold Auer, I don’t think it’s probably all that less difficult than Paganini. But with Tchaikovsky, you come to it thinking about the music, whereas certainly growing up, with Paganini, you think it’s all about the technique. So there was that block for me, that it was all about the virtuosity, not the music.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

A more contemporary musician and composer you’ve recorded for Caprices is the American Mark O’Connor. How did you come across him?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

That was recent. I knew of him as a bluegrass violinist. My producer Matthew Bennett had been concerned that an album of caprices would be all fast and loud and virtuosic, and I knew I had to be more and more searching in my attitude to the programming. I spent a lot of time on Google, and found the O’Connor Caprices. I was so excited, and I realised you could download the music from his website. I played some friends the beginning of each track to choose one, because I couldn’t decide, and I could only have one on the album. But they’re all really good. He’s an amazing musician.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I first saw him, funnily enough, on a TV series in the 80s called Down Home. It was Aly Bain, the Scottish fiddler, doing a travelogue documentary series…

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Oh!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

…You’d love it. Don’t know if it’s online now.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Someone will have uploaded it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I hope so. A compilation CD came out as well [The Legendary Down Home Recordings, Lismor Recordings, 1990]. It was him visiting Nova Scotia, the Appalachians, Nashville, Louisiana and finding and playing with all the fiddlers who lived in these places. And that’s how I first saw Mark O’Connor.

Aly Bain and Mark O’Connor, from Down Home (Pelicula Films for Channel 4, first broadcast Mar/Apr 1986)

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

I discovered people like Aly Bain at music college, when I met Seonaid Aitken, whose work also appears on Caprices. She introduced me to Scottish fiddle music – we’d sit in corridors and she’d teach me tunes. I would love to take a year’s sabbatical, and go and learn how to play fiddle music properly from different people. But it’s never gonna happen – it’s a language to them, and I’m always going to be ‘a classically trained violinist who’s trying to play fiddle music’. So I guess I try and find a mid-ground, almost the way I approach Bach. With both Bach and Scottish fiddle music, I know how the people who know what they’re doing play it. I know I have a specific technique that’s very hard to walk away from. And I don’t want to play it in the way that my contemporary classical training tells me I should play. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you think the nature of classical music, whatever the instrument, is the interpretative nature of it? That it’s still notes on a page, and folk is generally taught aurally?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

It’s like, if someone’s been classically trained, in ballet, and they try and do another dance form, there’s almost this stiffness, and trying to break out of that would be extremely difficult. Similarly, if you’ve been classically trained as a violinist, you’ve been perfecting this technique for years, and suddenly somebody’s saying, ‘Yeah but forget all that, because that doesn’t work here’, and so it’s finding new ways. But for instance, playing the really fast triplets in some folk fiddle reels – if I try and do that with my classical bow technique, I can’t do it. I have to find a new way of holding my bow, holding my arm. It’s something way more relaxed, that isn’t focused on projection. Letting go of trying too hard, actually.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And it’s a risk. You’ve spent all this time, this is your career, this is what you’ve wanted.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

But then Seonaid is an incredible classical violinist, and also an incredible folk fiddler. And I met this incredible Finnish violinist, Pekka Kuusisto, on a music festival course when I was still in college. In Finland, they have both traditions and he’s as comfortable in either. He did this amazing performance at the Proms where he played some Finnish folk music and got the audience singing along.

Pekka Kuusisto: Encore – My Darling is Beautiful (BBC Proms, 5 August 2016)

JUSTIN LEWIS

In 2022, as well as Caprices, you’ve also released an album with the pianist Joseph Tong, of violin and piano music by Sibelius. I adored that album. You mentioned to me that you came across those when you were a student.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

This is Pekka again! [Giggles] At that same festival, he said to me, ‘Didn’t you know that Sibelius wrote all of this music for violin and piano?’ I knew the [violin] concerto, the Sonatina, and the Humoresques, but nothing else. So I looked up all this other music, very expensive, but I ended up slowly piecing together all these collections and sets of music, and programming and performing them. And everybody was loving the music, but nobody ever performs it, although the ‘Romance’ (Opus 78) is often given to students. Maybe it’s expensive to buy the parts. But because nobody plays it, you don’t hear it, therefore you don’t know that it’s there. That was the case for me. So when Joe asked me to record it all, I was definitely going to say yes to that! Until Opus 81, Sibelius wrote them as bread-and-butter music, salon pieces for his publisher, so he could earn a living. Once he’d got his stipend, he didn’t have to worry about feeding himself, he was always going to be looked after, so everything after that, he wrote because he wanted to. They get really odd, but in a really wonderful way.

—-

FIRST: R.E.M.: Out of Time (1991, Warner Bros.)

Extract: ‘Shiny Happy People’

JUSTIN LEWIS

Going back a bit, let’s talk about your first purchase.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

As I say, my dad wouldn’t listen to anything non-classical.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

This was a rebellion for you.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Absolutely. I think I was in upper fifth at school, and we had a common room where Capital Radio was always on. But already, before that, in the art room, our art teacher had a record collection, and would let us put music on to listen to. He had loads of 60s and 70s stuff. That was my introduction to Police and Sting… and loads of non-classical music, while at home, I would play generally-loud-and-annoying pop and rock in my bedroom. I felt like a mega-rebel for buying an REM album, from HMV. I think someone in my class at school had played it to me. And I just wanted to keep listening to it, which meant having my own copy.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you listen to much pop subsequently?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

On youth orchestra tours, I was introduced to Beatles albums on the coach. I know Beatles 1 very well. [Laughs] And then I went to study in Germany, where I was listening to German radio a lot, but I was mostly buying things like Rachmaninoff playing Rachmaninoff, and the great pianists of the first half of the twentieth century. Ancient music!

 

I went through a period of not being very happy, and the more unhappy I was, the less I listened to music. Although little things shone through. I played in a tango festival, and the double bass player copied me some CDs, one of which was John Coltrane’s Ballads. I listened to that relentlessly, and I still go back to that album whenever I just need a hug.

 

Then about six years ago, my whole life kind of changed, and as I was coming out of this darkness, I was really beginning to listen to other music I didn’t know. When I started seeing my boyfriend, one of the first things he did – because he couldn’t believe I didn’t know loads of music – was he did a Spotify playlist for me of all his favourite tracks. It introduced me to so many bands, so many musicians, got me going out, buying albums, and listening to this whole wealth of music that I just didn’t know about. It just makes life so much more colourful.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It sounds like what’s happened to you with pop, discovering more, has happened to me with classical. I knew bits, but not lots. And sometimes, you’re just looking or listening in a different direction anyway. It’s not like you can be immersed in everything.  

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

When you’re doing music for a living, you can get to the point where, if you’ve been focused on playing music all day, you don’t want to listen to any more, even another sort of music… Quite often, I want to veg, and if I’m listening to classical music, then I’m concentrating.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Is it possible for you to listen to classical music and not have an analytical head on?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

I have to be in the right frame of mind, listening to musicians I really trust so I can sit back from that analytical mindset. When it’s people I don’t trust, that’s more difficult, and I start thinking, ‘Why did you do that?’ I hate that attitude, though – if we all came and did the same carbon-copy performance, it’d be no good for anybody. At the same time, when something then becomes nonsensical because of musical decisions or because they’ve ignored something in the score, the performance isn’t going to make sense. But I love concerts, where I can just sit. Especially with new music you don’t know, or with supporting composer/performer friends. You’re sitting there waiting, to listen in a generous way. You’re not going to sit there, picking them apart!

LAST: ELLA FITZGERALD: Best Of (Decca)

Extract: ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ (1945 recording, with the Delta Rhythm Boys)

ENELLA HUMPHREYS

I’ve taken to trawling the charity shops for LPs, mostly for jazz albums. The last I got was Best of Ella Fitzgerald. When I was young, when my dad wasn’t looking, we’d get my mum’s little box of records out: Tom Lehrer, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. I loved them all, but all the jazz standards were amazing, and Ella and Louis doing songs from Porgy & Bess were so great. When I was twelve or so I started learning some Jascha Heifetz arrangements of the Porgy & Bess songs on violin, and then I could listen to their recording as much as I wanted! But I was in love with the quality of Ella’s voice – it was like nothing else. I did have some of these on CD later, but it wasn’t the same. So now when I see them in vinyl, I grab them.

—-

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

On your Patreon, you share clips of some of your practice sessions. I don’t know if this is how you see it, but it feels like a demystification of practice. Because I think of people such as yourself, and think, ‘You’re amazing’, but obviously when you’re in practice mode, it’s still always, in a sense, work in progress. I’ve started practising the flute again recently, after a very long break away from it, and it’s been very inspiring, from watching your practice videos, to realise that it’s about slow improvement from wherever you currently are. You’ve been a big inspiration!

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Oh, thank you. It doesn’t matter who you are, what level you’re at, it’s all about the practising – and little and often. Obviously, for me, it’s dependent on what my day brings – not every day can be, like, seven hours of practice – but for kids learning or adults coming back to music, five minutes of good, solid work a day is way better than one hour, one day a week. However good that hour is. Because with five or ten minutes, you’re training your brain, your fingers, your ears, in a really concentrated way. With practice, as long as it’s done in a focused, thinking, ears-open sort of way, you’re always improving. Even if it doesn’t feel like it in the minute, and you feel like you’re going one step forward, two steps back… If you don’t do that, then nobody – whether you’re a beginner or Itzhak Perlman – can get away without doing the work.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your Twitter bio reads ‘mostly chained to a hot violin’ – is it about keeping the instrument warm?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

There is a saying in the music world: You don’t practise one day, you can hear it. You don’t practise two days, the critics can hear it. You don’t practise three days, the audience can hear it. There’s a real truth in that. If I don’t play today, and I go and do a concert tomorrow without having practised, I’ll really know about it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Even if nobody else does?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

I don’t think anyone else would. But I’d know about it. If I go in with the approach of ‘Don’t be hard on yourself, if you mess anything up’, then you probably won’t mess anything up. But if I know I haven’t practised, the flexibility in my fingers doesn’t quite feel the same, or the way the strings feel under the fingers, or the way the bow feels in my hand. I’m sure a lot of it’s psychological. Because how, when you’re doing it constantly, could two days of not touching the instrument have that effect, and I’m sure it can’t. But we’re so used to the idea of ‘you can’t go on stage if you haven’t put the hours in’…

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Especially when everything is so demanding, technically.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Yeah. And everything is on this tiny knife-edge. The increments, for something to be right or wrong, on the violin, especially the higher up [the fingerboard] you get, and with so much double-stopping as well, running around like crazy, lots of massive shifts… There’s such a tiny difference between something being right and wrong. So you have to give yourself the best chance of it being right.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I interviewed the conductor Lev Parikian in episode 1 of this series, who’s worked with you a lot, he mentioned a phrase you use when discussing repertoire or programming a concert: ‘Let me see if it’s in the fingers.’

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Yes.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now, that ties in with what you were just saying, about the link between the brain and the hands. You’ve got the mental memory of the repertoire, in your head, much of it you’ve probably carried around for many years, but also there’s the memory that’s in your fingers.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Yes. When you talk to people who know anything about science, or psychology, quite often they’ll tell me that everything I say is complete nonsense, but I know how it feels! For example, yesterday, I had to play this very virtuosic piece by Sarasate called ‘Navarra’, which is for two violins and either piano or orchestra. I’d been asked at quite short notice to do this – and I thought, I’ll make it work, because it was at Buckingham Palace! I’d not performed inside there before – I had been to the galleries but that’s all. I decided I’d do it, and I remembered the piece being really tricky, but I could vaguely remember it by ear. So I got them to send the music to me, because my music’s in storage at the moment.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It hadn’t seemed like a priority piece?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

No, there was no sense that I would ever have played it again. They sent me the music, I started reading through it, and I thought, ‘It’s like I played this last week.’ But I hadn’t since I was 13, maybe 14. Yet somehow, my fingers remember it so well. And I would never have played it very well as a kid, I don’t think, because I wasn’t good enough at that age. I find that just utterly random – that your brain has internalised something so well, from when you were a child…

 

Whereas I recently went back to a Bach concerto that I studied very seriously with my first proper teacher. My old copy was so full of markings I could barely read the music, so I got a new copy. I was practising it, thinking, ‘Why am I shifting like this? This is very strange.’ I checked my old copy, and clearly written in the music is my teacher telling me exactly how to do that shift. So even the mechanics of something like that can be retained by your muscle memory. Some people say muscle memory doesn’t exist, but it HAS to, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been doing that. Unless my subconscious is telling me.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m not a scientist either! Sometimes you retain unexpected versions of memory. With the flute practice I mentioned earlier, I’d kept all the sheet music from my teens. So I went back, opened the box. I’ve not had a lesson since 1990! When I was twenty. I’m being kind to myself at the moment: ‘Let’s get the Grade V pieces right first.’ And I was really surprised by how much I remembered, how much came flooding back very quickly. But all the way along, the past thirty years, my fingers have often been playing, without the instrument being there. That fingers stuff has still been there, subconsciously. Do you do that?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

All the time. Subconsciously, but also purposefully. Weirdly, if I’m struggling to get off to sleep, I find if I just sit and play something on my arm, I quite often find that lulls me. Which is the opposite of what it should be doing, of course. [Laughs]

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But it’s a kind of release or reassurance, I guess?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

You can just lull yourself into a piece, and concentrate on it because you’re playing it, but gradually, quietly, it goes into your subconscious mind. Sometimes I’ll do it with something I’m actually playing, but often I’ll do it with Bach’s Chaconne, because even though the overall structure is huge and changeable, because there’s this repeated eight-bar ground bass line underpinning it all the way through, there’s something quite lulling about concentrating on that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So how quickly did you or people around you start to think, ‘You know what? You’re musical’?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Musically, when I was teeny-tiny. We didn’t have a piano, but my dad was really into Early Music, and he’d made a kit spinet, like an early form of a keyboard instrument. And if I was teething, and grouchy, the only thing which would placate me was playing notes on the keyboard. A little bit later, somebody gave me one of these plinkety-plonk boxes, like a one-octave piano keyboard on the front. My mum says that nobody could figure out how to play a tune on it, but I’d just sit there for hours playing tunes that sounded like tunes.

 

And with the violin, my brother was learning, and I probably had tantrums about not being allowed to play the violin. So eventually they let me have lessons as well. [My first teacher was] a bit of a disaster, but when I went to the next teacher, who was a wonderful violinist, I think I was learning really quickly, and was obviously extremely keen, and loved it. When I was asked what I was going to be when I grew up, I’d always say, ‘I’m going to be a violinist, a pianist, a singer and a ballet dancer.’ Because I’d started dancing way before playing a musical instrument. I did ballet shows from when I was two. That was what I really wanted to do – but I wasn’t good enough!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Has dancing helped you with violin playing, just in terms of movement and physicality?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Definitely with posture, and stage presence, so I was used to presenting myself on stage. When I was little, in ballet class, they would bang on about how the first foot you put on stage is the beginning of your performance. If you slope on stage, like you’re sorry to be there, immediately that’s giving a certain impression of your playing to the audience. But also, anything that gives you knowledge of your muscles, knowledge of how to use your limbs, has to help.

—-

ANYTHING: JOSEF HASSID: Teenage Genius (2017 compilation, Digital Grammophon)

Extract: ‘Hebrew Melody’

 

 JUSTIN LEWIS

Growing up, were there particular musicians you regarded as role models?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

I tended to be interested in people who moved me with their playing. So when I was little, as far as the violinists went: Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962), and also this guy called Josef Hassid (1923–50). He totally changed my life.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was just reading up about Josef Hassid yesterday. A Polish-born violinist in England who was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was just seventeen.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

What an extraordinary talent, and what an extraordinary waste. If he’d been born just fifty years later, when people had a bit more understanding about the brain, that the answer wasn’t always to cut bits out of it. You just think of what we lost.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I checked newspaper archives but couldn’t find obits. The Wikipedia page alone is a horrifying read. But the recordings I just sampled were remarkable.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

There are just eight little pieces. That’s all we have left of him. But at least with those recordings, we can hear just how extraordinary that playing was – that vibrato, that sound. The whole musicality is just unforgettable.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Some of these recordings from so long ago can really cut to you. From the dawn of recorded sound. Obviously by the standards of later recording techniques, it sounds primitive but…

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

My dad had a lot of these recordings, not just Hassid, but much earlier ones. Unfortunately, a lot of the recordings from the early 1900s, people like Joseph Joachim, were of people at the end of their careers. You look at the writing of the time, people who knew Joachim, saying, ‘This is not how he sounded when he was playing with Brahms’, when they were working on the concerto together [in the late 1870s]. His hands were older, to some extent had seized up, so you can’t presume that’s how vibrato sounded then. That’s how an old man was playing vibrato. And we all know that, as we get older, and our hands seize up a bit, you physically can’t do it. The recordings are an amazing thing to have, but we can’t take them as what it was really like, or as a guide.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s the closest we’ve got.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Yeah. I also loved the French violinist Ginette Neveu (1919–49) and I’m sure a little bit of that was ‘one woman in a sea of men’. For me growing up, there was no question that women shouldn’t be violinists, because there were so many contemporary women violinists with amazing careers… But I tended to listen to violinists from the first half of the twentieth century, and they were all men, except for Ginette Neveu.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And she died very young, didn’t she, in a plane crash?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Yes, with her brother, and I think there was a boxer on the plane as well. And then you get these people saying, ‘Oh yes and her violin was in the crash as well’ – well, if you’d lost the violin and kept the violinist, I’d be happy with that!

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I first discovered you and your work during lockdown in 2020, when you were doing concerts from your home. I can’t imagine the impact that lockdown had on someone like yourself, whose livelihood is performance. Presumably the idea to do home concerts online came from: Necessity is the mother of invention?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Yes. Most musicians I know do some teaching, some session work, they had other things they could still earn money from, during lockdown. And I didn’t. All I had was performing – so when that stopped, I had no earning capability. When it was becoming abundantly clear that lockdown wasn’t only going to be a couple of weeks, I was panicked. So my boyfriend persuaded me into doing a livestream. He said, ‘Look, loads of people support you, loads of people suddenly don’t have their live music fix. If it’s awful, you don’t have to do it again. Try it.’ I didn’t want to put it all behind a paywall because I wanted to be accessible not just to people like my mum, but also people who were in the same dire financial situations as me. I wanted those videos to be available to everyone. So I put them on YouTube.

 

With the first video, the sound was decent because we had a good mic plugged in, but the video quality’s appalling. But we carried on doing them, learning the tech, because people were so supportive, and it meant that I could still pay the rent, and eat! The basics – because I had no money and nothing to fall back on.

 

So it was borne out of necessity. But I also wanted to make sure new music was represented in these home concerts, especially as it was unaccompanied violin music. Introducing people to composers they might not know, and younger composers. And people started sending me scores, and writing music for me. Normally in real life, pre-covid, you’d have to put your concert programme together a year, 18 months ahead. But suddenly, someone could send you a score on Tuesday, and you could play it on Wednesday in the home concert.

 

Having said that, I found those concerts incredibly nerve-wracking. A live performance, but no audience there. This constant fear of ‘Maybe nobody’s even listening’ – am I going through all this for nothing?! If you’re used to playing live in the In Tune studio (on Radio 3), where there’s a couple of producers and a presenter, but no audience as such, at least you’ve got used to that mentality. But in your own living room, there’s no acoustic, the microphone’s really quite close, and there isn’t a proper engineer dealing with the sound. So soundwise, it took a while to learn how to play well, but also… is anyone listening?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re communicating into the ether, and you don’t know if anything will come back! That must be very disconcerting.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

It is. Doing those livestreams, I suddenly realised I had never stood back and thought about the role of an audience in my playing, in real time. Especially as I’d subconsciously always seen the audience as judging me. I’d had a very uncomfortable relationship with an audience, pre-covid. But when I started doing these livestreams, which I hated doing, all these people were, yes, sending money so I was able to eat, but also sending me beautiful messages. I realised all these people really cared about what I was doing, and that they genuinely wanted to hear me playing that music.

 

I had been very nervous doing those livestreams, and a part of me was worried that when I did start performing live again, I’d bring that discomfort to the stage with me. I remember the first concert after lockdown, at the Chiltern Arts Festival. I think it had been seven months since I’d had a live audience. I walked out onstage and I heard the applause and I felt this utter joy in my stomach – that there were real people to share the music with.

 

I realised then that my whole attitude towards the audience had completely changed. I didn’t go out there expecting to be judged, I just went out to enjoy performing. And I’ve been so much happier since – everything to do with my performance is now so much healthier. I mean, it’s stupid that it took that long to realise that, in a way, but I suppose when things have been inbuilt when you’re a child, and people are constantly judging you, it’s very difficult if you don’t realise that that’s how you’re feeling about it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As an audience member, I’ve only so far been to a few concerts this year, but I’ve felt – and you know this! – that most people who come, the vast majority, are there to have a good time. We’re not there with our notebooks. We love it.

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

I know. But five years ago, I’d have said that was what an audience member was there to do. Unwittingly, I’d carried this burden, of being judged, or being afraid of making a mistake. Because that’s what it was like at school! And I realise that I’d had that inside me the whole time. I had no idea – until it all changed! It’s that imposter syndrome that we all have. I knew I had it, but I assumed nobody else does. And then you realise everybody does.

 

Also, during the last few years pre-covid, I’d been learning how to do my own thing at concerts with unaccompanied performances. I wasn’t relying on anyone else. It was just me, and I learned how to have my relationship with an audience, and with different audiences in different ways. And I enjoyed not just playing the music, but also talking to audiences – it’s fun, actually. As long as they react! [Laughter]

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you introduce the repertoire, what you’re going to play?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Yes, doing a solo concert, I always talk to the audience. Unless I’ve specifically been asked not to. Because what I’m playing can be challenging, but actually giving them things to hold on to.

If somebody’s giving you a way into it, you’re more likely to listen to it with open ears. I want to make sure there’s variety there – that people will come for something, but they’ll also hear something else. I still have imposter syndrome – ‘What are they going to think?’ – but as soon as I start performing, and I’ve developed that relationship with the audience, I’m usually fine.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are you preparing for the fact it might go wrong, even though the chances of that are tiny?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

I suppose there is a bit of ‘You’re only as good as your last concert’. People might hate it. Suddenly, in the middle of everything, you might get an audience who can’t stand you. And part of it’s pure perfectionism. As a violinist, you grow up knowing that everything has to be perfect. ‘If it’s not perfect, it’s not good enough.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you think you’ve become such a spectacular, thoughtful musician because of that sense of perfectionism, or despite that?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

Definitely despite it. But you have to have perfectionism. For a start, you have to have that personality type who has that focus and drive and is willing to repeat something three billion times, to make sure it’s always going to be right in the context of a concert.

 

The real problem with perfectionism is when it creates blocks. With my first proper violin teacher – yes, it was about perfectionism, but it was also about building me as a human being, and as a musician, as a violinist. And that’s not damaging, because it makes you focus in practice. But if you get a teacher who says it’s a disaster if it’s not perfect – that can take a long time to get over. It did in my case.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you think audiences have changed – in the sense of being more receptive?

 

FENELLA HUMPHREYS

I love that I get to talk to my audience. I kind of miss that when I play a concerto, you can’t really go, ‘Hey, high-five!’ [Laughter] Although with something like Tchaikovsky’s concerto, I will often know at the end of the first movement if they like me, because quite often they’ll clap. But with a lot of concertos, I only really know for sure that they’re enjoying it right at the end of the performance.

 

Whereas when I am talking to the audience, I know immediately. Usually my first piece in a solo programme will be quite short – it gives people a way to get their focus started, rather than with something hugely long. If you’ve just walked off the street, after a long busy day, it helps to have something short and sweet at the start. So in most programmes I do, within the first five or ten minutes, I’ve already got that validation from my audience!

 

[So yes, the relationship between performers and audiences has changed.] Nobody would have expected Heifetz to talk to an audience. Can you imagine, in the first half of the twentieth century, if you’d had Twitter, and if you’d had all these Q&As after concerts?

 

(c) Matthew Johnson

Fenella’s Caprices album, released in March 2022, is available from Rubicon Classics. It went on to win the BBC Music Magazine Premiere Award in 2023. In spring 2024, another equally rich collection of unaccompanied violin works, Prism, was also released by Rubicon.

Her album of Sibelius: Works for Violin and Piano, with the pianist Joseph Tong, was released in January 2022, through Resonus Classics.

In June 2023, Fenella performed the world premiere of Adrian Sutton’s Violin Concerto at London’s Southbank Centre with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, as part of a celebration of Adrian’s career so far, called Seize the Day. Adrian wrote the concerto especially for Fenella, and she has since recorded it with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Michael Seal. In April 2025, the recording won the BBC Music Magazine 2025 Premiere Award.

Among Fenella’s upcoming events during the summer of 2025, look out in particular for the premiere of Mark Boden’s violin concerto, Chasing Sunlight. She will be performing this with Sinfonia Cymru in Cardiff (twice on 5 June – as part of World Environment Day), in Bradford (6 June) and at the Southbank Centre, London on Sunday 6 July. See her website for information and links to these live events, festival engagements and latest news: Fenella Humphreys : Violinist. Do go and see her play – she truly is amazing.

During autumn 2025, Fenella will be Artist in Residence at the Wigmore Hall, London.

Fenella is represented by Cambridge Creative Management: www.cambridgecreativemanagement.co.uk/fenellahumphreys-ccm

You can follow Fenella on Twitter at @fhvln.

 

FLA Playlist 5

Fenella Humphreys

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Violin Concerto Op. 15: 1. Moderato con moto

Mark Lubotsky, English Chamber Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgJV0M_7l6o

 [NB Fenella also recommends the recording by Anthony Marwood, released by Hyperion. This was not on Spotify at the time of our conversation in May 2022, but it is now. You can also hear it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1SIbRJY8Io]

Track 2: MARK O’CONNOR: Caprice No. 1

Fenella Humphreys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc5neCQPQ9U

 

Track 3: SEONAID AITKEN: Glasgow Reel Set

Fenella Humphreys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOeNX4HyNQ

 

Track 4: JEAN SIBELIUS: Four Pieces, Op. 78: I. Impromptu

Fenella Humphreys, Joseph Tong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbmGvl5ho2s

 

Track 5: R.E.M.: ‘Shiny Happy People’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpOQoLZQUPc

Track 6: THE BEATLES: ‘Yellow Submarine’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhxJAxa77sE

 

Track 7: JOHN COLTRANE QUARTET: ‘Say It (Over and Over Again)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRh0hxV1_SU

 

Track 8: ELLA FITZGERALD & THE DELTA RHYTHM BOYS: ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnx8bohIqkA

 

Track 9: J.S. BACH: Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004: V. Ciaccona

Rachel Podger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XnXQOZd0ZI

 

Track 10: JOSEPH ACHRON: Hebrew Melody, Op. 33

Josef Hassid, Gerald Moore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmfCjgI50Fo

 

Track 11: JOSEF SUK: 4 Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 17: No. 1, Quasi Ballata

Ginette Neveu, Jean Neveu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbagMgNvr1E