AFCM #2: Home from home...

There’s that moment when after a 24-hour journey you peer out of the plane window at the country you’re about to visit and you see...Australian sunlight. I haven’t been here for 15 years and had managed to forget its unique nature. The quality of it is like opals, brilliant and translucent and full of gold, ochre and purple. You have to screw up your eyes against it, or rush for sunglasses. Strong, pure and irresistible, as if shot in technicolour, it makes you wonder if the Land of Oz was so named for a good reason. Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more...

We’ve made it to Townsville, in the dry tropics of Queensland, and now it’s the morning after the night before...and that was the night after the day after the journey before. We left London with two big suitcases on Tuesday night, spent a pleasant few hours in Hong Kong airport and arrived in Sydney on Thursday morning...with one big suitcase. Sole free day in Sydney was supposed to be spent happily reuniting at leisure with my aunt, whom I hadn’t seen for 15 years, but this turned into a hasty and frazzled coffee in between frantic calls to the airport where we’d shunted from office to office for about three hours upon arrival. The case arrived 24 hours after we did and has joined us here. At least it wasn’t the one that contained my Anna Magdalena costume.

View from our window this morning! #townsville #queensland #afcm #classicalmusic #australia 

A post shared by Jessica Duchen (@jessica.duchen) on Jul 27, 2018 at 4:49pm PDT

All in all, I can think of worse places to hold a chamber music festival. We’re staying - along with all the festival artists - in an apartment hotel near the marina; the sun is pouring into our new home-from-home across the cluster of lilttle boats  this morning, the Strand beside the sea awaits exploration, as do its gelatarias, there’s a massive seafood bar across the road and yesterday’s opening concert was a heap of musical joys.

It was full of fresh, startling ideas, juxtapositions and collaborations, with Tine Thing Helseth and Katya Apekisheva shining amid an all-star line-up for the Saint-Saens Septet, eight cellists plus wonderful Siobhan Stagg in the Villa Lobossome amazing new timbres from marimba, sheng and bandoneon in world premieres by JP Jofre and Paul Stanhope, and a completely barnstorming performance of the Chausson Concert by Kathy Stott, Alexander Sitkovetsky and the Goldner String Quartet. The big concerts take place in the Townsville Civic Theatre, a sizeable modern hall from which last night’s concert went out live on the radio - splendidly hosted by Mairi Nicolson, whose interviews with the musicians while the stage set-up changed were fun, interesting and sympathetic.

Backstage, of course, it’s hard not to think “YIKES, I have to do the Bach show HERE?”, given the impressive scale of the whole thing - but with a chance to catch up with old friends like Kathy, Katya and Guy Johnston and to meet new ones over artist drinks-and-eats post-concert, the nerves quickly dispel. For performers in festivals like this, the treat is exactly that: to work with colleagues you’re meeting for the first time, forge new connections, spark ideas into being, and while away the post-concert wind-down over Australian beer or wine in which jet-lag becomes but a memory and lost suitcases all part of life’s rich pattern. I’ve now met many of my Bach show colleagues, Roddy Williams, Siobhan Stagg, Pavel Fischer, Kees Boersma and the Goldner String Quartet, among others. And out front in the audience, one can’t help noticing the way that people are running into one another as festival regulars over years and years, catching up in (where else) the queue for the ladies’ loos (“How are you? We met four years ago right here!”) and, better still, over ice-cream in front of the theatre, under the full moon.

A last thought for the morning: this is winter. It’s 28 degrees and there is simply no sunlight in the world quite like this. It’s going to be one amazing week.

Update: I think I’ve worked out how to bring the photos in from Instagram, but please visit my instagram account to see some more.

#AFCM1: All set, sort of...

It's tomorrow! We are off to Australia for a week in Townsville as part of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. And in the meantime I can report that you get some very interesting looks when trogging up to Vauxhall station in the heat of the sun, carrying a huge plastic bag emblazoned with NATIONAL THEATRE COSTUME AND PROPS HIRE.

Tucked away in a south London warehouse/college/arts pad a few minutes from the Oval cricket ground, there's a facility that, if you like dressing up or giving theatrical performances of any type, is better than Aladdin and his Genie ever dreamed of. London's Royal National Theatre here keeps row upon tempting row of costumes - covering all eras from echt-Shakespeare to 1920s flapperville to 1980s glam rock - and they hire them out for a suitable fee. Silken gowns, embroidered waistcoats, feathered and bejewelled headdresses, era-appropriate strings of pearls, underskirts of any colour, petticoats galore, and the sort of under-contraptions you're very lucky not to need to wear under your dress in this day and age. Walk in and you might even see an ass's head lurking on a shelf, ready for the next Midsummer Night request.

You phone them up, book in and have a good browse, with a chance to try on your most suitable targets, complete with accessories of any type from royal crown to bum pads. I can't say I ever expected to need bum pads, but bum pads I've now got, because they go under 18th-century dresses to create that sumptuous shape... A happy afternoon a few weeks ago led me to the perfect outfit for Anna Magdalena Bach to take to Australia: a dark overdress with a subtle pattern and a black underskirt. Nothing fancy, I promise. Just...18th century.

I did try to research what Anna Magdalena looked like. There aren't many pictures of her. There is, however, this:

Ouch. Owowowowowch.

As you may remember, Kathryn Stott, the new AFCM artistic director, has commissioned me to write and perform a new show with words and music about Anna Magdalena Bach. Being Mrs Bach will receive its world premiere on 1 August, 5pm, with musicians including Roderick Williams (baritone), Siobhan Stagg (soprano), Guy Johnston (cello), Daniel de Borah (piano), the Goldner String Quartet, Pavel Fischer (violin), Kees Boersma (double bass) and Winterschool Strings. Anna Magdalena, when she appears, is an impoverished widow, looking back over her life with Johann Sebastian, with all the associated agonies and ecstasies... And I've never worn a costume before. I hope I can still get into it on Wednesday week. In case you were wondering: Lucy Worsley I'm not. (Nor am I the blonde bombshell pictured above.)

The next day I'm giving a lecture about women composers for the festival's Winterschool and then joining Kathy and some of the musicians for the morning Meet the Artists chat on 3 August before heading, no doubt with reluctance, back to the airport. In the meantime I will be writing about the festival a fair bit, and have promised to do a daily blogpost while there, so please check back after Friday for my festival diary and PICS.



You wouldn't believe what it takes to get ready for a thing like this, unless you're especially prone to taking part in festivals on the other side of the world. First there's the preparation of the show. In October, I went to Leipzig to see the Bach family's own territory at first hand - it made all the difference, too. Then the writing and whittling down, choosing the music, fitting it all together, making sure it's the right length. That's the easy bit. Then the paperwork: visas, documents, passports, emails and more emails. (Can you believe we're going to have to do all this for Europe as well soon, when currently we don't? Those Brexiters are out of their tiny minds.) There's booking the travel, deciding where and when to stop (straight to Sydney on the way out, to see my aunt, then to Townsville the next morning; and Hong Kong on the way home...). The costume. The house-and-cat-sitter. Finishing everything that needs finishing before going. Remembering everything that needs to go in the suitcase. Panicking.

And above all, panicking about the jet-lag. Most of the festival artists - to judge from Kathy's Facebook pics - are already in Townsville and acclimatising. I'm still in sweltering in London and won't arrive until Friday. I'm not sure this was the greatest plan, but it's too late now...

Anyway, if all goes smoothly we shall be there in time for the big opening night on Friday evening, in which  no fewer than 24 festival artists will perform works by Saint-Saëns, Villa-Lobos, Paul Stanhope (world premiere of a new piece for marimba), Wu Tong performing another world premiere on the sheng, Leopoldo Federico, JP Jofre (world premiere of new piece for marimba, sheng and bandoneon), and one of my great all-time favourite pieces, the Chausson Concert, with Kathy on the piano, Alexander Sitkovetsky (violin) and the Goldner String Quartet. That would be enough to turn me upside-down on its own.

For the rest of the programme, please see here.

'Silver Birch' is in the SWAP'ra Gala!

I've done an interview for SWAP'ra, the new charity which aims to change the opera world to make it more user-friendly, all round, for women and parents.

Support for Women And Parents in Opera will be holding an inaugural gala concert at Opera Holland Park on 31 July consisting of extracts from operas famous and less so, in which all the performers and directors are female (though some of the composers, like Mozart and Strauss, were blokes...). Much to our delight, they're also including a scene from Roxanna Panufnik's and my Silver Birch - Anna's aria, in which she tells her son Jack that she will never let him risk his life. Helen Sherman plays our heroine and our original director, Karen Gillingham, will stage it. To my intense frustration, I won't be there. I have no objection to visiting Australia this summer, but I'm sorry to miss Silver Birch's first extract to be performed in London.

The full gala line-up is here. Do go along - there's treat upon treat upon treat, culminating with the Trio from Der Rosenkavalier starring Janis Kelly, Diana Montague and Mary Bevan, conducted by Jessica Cottis. Booking here.


Taster of my interview is below, and there are lots of other hard-hitting, tell-it-like-it-is interviews with the stars of the gala on the SWAP'ra website.

So many of the staple operas and repertoire are stories and music written by men. Why do you think this is, and do you think that a composer’s/librettist’s gender has any bearing on the kind of music she/he writes?

Much of this is historic. Let’s not forget that at present we are celebrating only 100 years of any British women having had the right to vote! Most of the world’s staple diet of opera is older than that; inevitably, women were not often able to be part of the creative teams as their fathers had to have accorded them a suitable musical education and their husbands had to permit their continuation of career (yuck) (but some did, and hooray for them). Plenty of works by women are crying out for rediscovery and they are now starting to be noticed. If more women composers are to be explored and resuscitated, it will also take the involvement of opera’s administrative framework to find, champion and stage them. It’s easier to get audiences into well-known pieces (though Silver Birch was totally sold out ☺ ) and it’s easy for operatic organisations to be…well, maybe a little bit lazy in this regard.

Does a composer/librettist’s gender have any bearing on the music? No. To prove it, try listening blind. I heard some songs recently by a composer named Poldowski and was impressed by their invention, their tremendous energy, their vivid colours and their beauty, and wondered why I’d never heard of him before. Then I looked him up. Turns out he was a she. ‘Poldowski’ was the pseudonym of Irène Wieniawska, later Lady Dean Paul, daughter of Henryk Wieniawski. She’s amazing.

SWAP’ra Supporting Women and Parents in Opera – was established in response to a collective frustration with the unconscious gender bias in the industry. The ultimate aim is to foster an environment in which a female CEO, Music Director, Artistic Director, Conductor, Composer or Librettist is no longer noteworthy.

The founders – Sophie Gilpin, Ella Marchment, Anna Patalong, Madeleine Pierard, and Kitty Whately – will address the gender imbalance in opera by encouraging best practice strategies for diversity and inclusivity, and effect industry-wide positive change by working to dismantle barriers for women and parents in leadership positions and senior artistic roles. Acting in an advisory capacity, SWAP’ra will work alongside a range of organisations to develop projects and schemes to further support or nurture female artistic talent.

Funds raised by this inaugural SWAP’ra gala will enable the organisation to make significant change in the industry. For more information, please visit the website: www.swap-ra.org

Slippery storytelling

Lauren Zolezzi as Nuria, Grant Doyle as Enric
Photo: Julian Guidera

I've been twice to see The Skating Rink at Garsington, the new opera they have commissioned from composer David Sawer and librettist Rory Mullarkey. Reviewing it is not my plan, as I'm a bit close to the place since Silver Birch last year and have some more projects in the pipeline, including a new piece for the Youth Company with composer Paul Fincham for 2019. I can say, though, that I found it enormously impressive, often very beautiful - the skating music and the snowy conclusion in particular - and, on balance, touching and engaging, more so than certain other highly-lauded recent operas I could mention. I hope it will have a long and happy life in the opera houses of many companies and countries hereafter.

If there's a problem, though, it's the narrative style and I suspect that might account for some of the reviews that found it a bit, er, icy. The opera is based on a novel by Roberto Bolano, set on the Costa Brava, in which the same story - the murder of an unfortunate down-and-out singer, Carmen - is told through the different eyes of several implicitly unreliable narrators. As it unfolds, we build up a picture of the hierarchies involved and the way that love, supposedly a private matter, can impact upon the fates of others. "Love is a rebel bird," says Carmen - well, she would, wouldn't she? The clinching image at the conclusion shows us what the ice rink really is: a better world, away from all that squalor and distress, where perhaps we could all be our happiest and best selves.

Yet preserving the novel's approach creates a special set of problems. First of all, each narrator tells his story in the past tense, while it is being acted in front of us. So, when the body of Susan Bickley as Carmen is lying on stage in a "thick black sea" of blood, our narrator tells us: "It was the singer". He could have run to her, tried to wake her, described how he feels - the shock, the pity, the terror - but no. He just tells us who it was, but we already know because we can see her. You get my drift.

Meanwhile, characters with whom we've engaged early on - Gaspar, the drifting would-be poet (Sam Furness, on splendiferous form) and his passion for the unfortunate addict Caridad (equally splendid Claire Wild), begin at the centre of our world and fade to the edges; Remo Moran (excellent Ben Edquist) gives his viewpoint, yet is never quite sympathetic or rounded out; and our real hero, Enric, does not emerge until the second half.

I'm concerned about this first of all because I'm not sure how you'd get around any of this when fashioning a piece out of a story told in that structure, but also because my Bach show for Townsville (on 1 August) is basically narrated as a flashback so that I don't have to convince anyone that I'm 20 at the beginning. On the other hand, nobody gets murdered (even though I have my doubts about Bach's quackish eye surgeon, John Taylor of London...). One wants it to be convincing, but how much does the past tense interfere when your audience is living the drama in the present? We'll see.

The opera's finest moments are when the narration has stopped and the action enters both real time and inner worlds. Enric's dream of skating, with an ungainly double in the same brown suit and pink shirt sliding about on the rink to the manner born, is sweet and touching; the party scene in which the mayor, Pilar (an imperious Louise Winter) rumbles Enric's embezzlement of funds for the rink while they dance raises the temperature in a valuable way.

The performance is absolutely top-notch, with wonderful contributions from the whole cast: Susan Bickley is outstanding as singer-turned-down-and-out Carmen, Alan Oke (come on, chaps, this guy should have national treasure status!) as her whispering, drawling, howling lover, Rookie, and Grant Doyle as Enric, the plump official whose life - and occasionally figure - is turned upside-down by his love for the Olympic skater Nuria Mari (a convincing joint performance by Alice Poggio as the skating Nuria and Lauren Zolezzi as the singing one). Garry Walker conducts an orchestra stuffed with interesting sounds including a Chilean charango, soprano saxophone and euphonium, plus an off-stage marching band.

But for me, the most touching thing of all was to see, among the onstage silent extras - a chorus that never sings - several very familiar faces from Silver Birch. David, who was the Warden at the beginning and walked the dog in the army desert scene (hey, Skating Rink company, didn't you find a role for Sam's Labrador, Poppy?); Bev, who came into our production among our hard-won military recruits; and Sheila, who had fallen on hard times, had never imagined she'd set foot on a stage and found that being part of the adult community chorus helped her turn her life around. How wonderful that they are back for more!

Some tickets remain for the final two performances - do go if you can. It's beautiful and haunting.

Hysteria: a guest post

Delighted to give the floor today to the BAFTA-award winning composer Jocelyn Pook, who tells us about Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist which premieres this Saturday 14 July at 7.30pm at Hoxton Hall (tickets here). Fasten your seatbelt: this is strong stuff.

Jocelyn Pook
Photo: Zoran S Pejic

I am fascinated by the power of the mind, the power of thought and the power of emotion to trigger a chemical reaction in the body. It is a point where the unconscious takes over and the body reacts of its own volition with a physical symptom.

So when the Wellcome Trust asked 10 artists including me to respond to the subject of Hysteria and psychosomatic disorders, it sparked 2 years of research resulting in the premiere this Saturday of my new work Hysteria:  A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist. Our brief from the Wellcome Trust was to pair up with a medical professional and I was lucky to work with the French psychiatrist Dr Stephanie Courtade. Stephanie has an unusually open, compassionate, humorous and perhaps at times unorthodox approach. As a result it was a fascinating process for me, resulting in the work occasionally veering off into quite unexpected directions.

I am constantly surprised by how many people around me have been afflicted by these conversion disorders.  Hysteria is an irksome and outdated term previously a preserve of female disorders in the 19^th century, yet now it is no longer considered a medical condition. Many of these ailments, if not necessarily critical, can however be debilitating. I wanted to find out whether hair turning white overnight was apocryphal or based on evidence.  

I came across cases of outbreaks of severe eczema during an unhappy love affair, something which had never affected that person before or subsequently. A friend’s grandfather’s hair fell out overnight during a a breakdown as a young man, which in those days was never talked about and became a family secret. A woman suffered from panic attacks to the point that she lost the ability to swallow liquid. There was a violinist I had known since youth orchestra, who became plagued by a  psychosomatic pain in her solar plexis whenever she performed in an orchestra and resulted in her changing career entirely. Every time she picked up the violin, the pain returned though it never does when she sings. And I did discover a case of a 12-year old girl whose hair turned white overnight when her mother died. At times, I have feel like a fly on a wall at a therapist’s studio.

  

The body speaks in so many different ways. As Stephanie says, “the body is like the stage for the drama and theatre play of the mind.” These examples are from men too, though the balance in this work is weighted unconsciously to more female voices.   

Hysteria’s long gestation was preceded by two earlier works linked to mental illness, making latest installment Part 3 of a Trilogy. It started with Hearing Voices inspired by protest literature from patients incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals and in particular my great aunt’s notes during more than 25 years lost in an “asylum” as they were then known. Part 2 was Anxiety Fanfare, a choral work which also explores the sometimes funny side of anxiety and the use of humour as a kind of survival mechanism. 

Like Hearing Voices, Hysteria will also be a multi-media project. So many of my works start with the primary sources - the witnesses from the front line.  It’s their testimonies, which form the kernel of all three works. Often the cadence and rhythm of a patient’s own recorded voice morphs into the voice of vocalist Melanie Pappenheim. The performance is not a load of crazy grimacing and shrieking, but deals with the more private moments of pain. I wanted this idea to be reflected in the music and performance, in a way that feels true to our experiences and observations. It was important for me to show people in a state where they aren’t completely broken.  

I have also incorporated many of Dr Stephanie Courtade’s insights about the medical profession, including her own experiences as a patient on the couch with a particularly unsympathetic psychiatrist. The common use now within the medical of profession of referring to patients as “service users”, seems particularly impersonal even if liberating them from illness. 

I feel immensely privileged that so many people have shared such intimate experiences with me – feel a responsibility to them. I still have so much material that I would still like to use, so I don’t know whether this is the finished piece.   

Tickets for Saturday here.

The UK film premiere of The Wife for which Jocelyn Pook wrote the filmscore, will be premiered at Somerset House on 9 August before going on general release on 28 September. Memorial, based on the poem by Alice Oswald with music by Jocelyn Pook comes to Barbican Theatre 27-30 September.