Fenella Humphreys (violin)
Emma Abbate (piano)

The first concert of our new 2024/25 Season is upon us – and what a rich afternoon it promises to be as we welcome back two artists who’ve performed for us before, in different ensembles. 
 
Violinist Fenella Humphreys is regarded as one of the UK’s most established and versatile violinists. Her solo work sees her fronting orchestras like the Royal Philharmonic, the Royal Scottish National and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, her recording work has made her a dual BBC Music Magazine award-winner and has brought her national and international acclaim and her career as a chamber musician has led her to become Concertmaster of the Deutsche Kammerakademie. She is also much in demand as a performer of new scores by a range of composers, most notably Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sally Beamish; in June 2023, she premiered a violin concerto, dedicated to her by Adrian Sutton, at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. And this gives just a small taste of her busy career.
 
For our concert, she has teamed up with renowned Italian pianist Emma Abbate, whose work as an accompanist and chamber musician has made her a frequent performer at UK venues such as the Wigmore Hall, the Southbank Centre, the Royal Opera House and St John’s Smith Square; she will also be familiar to listeners of BBC Radio 3, for whom she regularly broadcasts. In her ‘spare time’ (euphemism of the week alert…), she is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and a staff coach at the Royal Opera House; and she has also been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in recognition of her “significant contribution” to the music profession. Yes, we’re in for something special.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Scherzo in C minor from F.A.E. Sonata
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979): Midsummer Moon
Wolfang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Sonata in B flat major for violin and piano, K. 454
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918): D'un matin de printemps
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924): Andante op. 75 & Berceuse op. 16
Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): Fratres
Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1947): Adagio for violin and piano H.72
Bela Bartók (1881-1945): Romanian Folk Dances

“...Humphreys's utter absorption and delight shines forth at every turn...... strong-toned, easy fluidity and immaculate technique...”
(Charlotte Gardner, Gramaphone Magazine) 

"Pianist Emma Abbate is a consummate chamber player."
(Colin Clarke, Classical Explorer)

“I would sooner be regarded as a 16th-rate composer
than be judged as if there were one kind of musical art
for men and another for women."
Rebecca Clarke

While recent decades have ably demonstrated it was society not talent that historically stood in the way of women in the arts (think 19th century female students being excluded from life drawing classes on moral grounds, for fear they’d spy what lies beneath the fig leaf), yet, if we’re honest, familiarity bias means that when we close our eyes and imagine a composer, he generally comes with a beard and mustachios. Pace James Brown, the Western canon still feels like a man’s world. 

But violinist Fenella Humphreys is a champion of female composers; she has dedicated time and effort to seeking out their frequently unknown and under-performed repertoire and we’re delighted that for her upcoming concert with pianist Emma Abbate on 15th September she’s featuring works by Fanny Mendelssohn, Lili Boulanger and Rebecca Clarke.
 
Musicologists agree that neither Fanny nor her brother Felix could have existed as we know them today without the other, yet the story of the former’s struggles to compose is all too well-known by now, Exhibit A in the tale being her father’s letter of 1820: “Music will perhaps become his [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament”. Her Adagio for violin and piano H.72 was written in 1823 when she was just 17.  It’s her second piece of completed chamber music and, as Exhibit B, it provides evidence of the teenager’s already prodigious abilities.
 
Lili Boulanger was the first female winner of the Paris Conservatoire’s Prix de Rome composition prize, aged 19. Just five years later, in 1918, she was dead from tuberculosis. D’un matin de printemps dates from c.1917, an orchestral version of the duet being the last large-scale work composed by Boulanger before her death. With its glittering echoes of Claude Debussy (a major influence on Boulanger’s style), it leaves one wondering what might have been.
 
Viola virtuoso Rebecca Clarke became one of London’s first female professional orchestral players, a move born out of necessity: her father threw her out of the house and cut off all funding of her studies at the Royal College of Music. Her UK career saw her performing alongside Henry Wood, Pablo Casals and George Szell, among others, but in 1916, aged 30, she moved to the USA. There, she took up composition again, sometimes working under the pseudonym ‘Anthony Trent’. Curiously, reviewers praised ‘Trent’s’ pieces more highly than anything submitted under Clarke’s own name… Midsummer Moon was written in 1924 as a violin and piano ‘miniature’ – it’s a perfect showcase of her hard-won skills.
 
Hardly ‘also-rans’, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Fauré, Bela Bartók, Arvo Pärt (more on him below) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart complete what looks set to be a powerful programme with, respectively, the Scherzo in C minor from the F-A-E Sonata, Andante op. 75 and Berceuse op. 16, the Romanian Folk Dances, Fratres and the Sonata in B flat major for violin and piano, K. 454. This last was written by Mozart specifically for the female violinist Regina Strinasacchi and performed by them together in Vienna in 1784 – evidence, perhaps, that Mozart was gender-blind when it came to musical genius? (Pub quiz fact: it was this Sonata that Mozart famously played with a blank sheet of music paper in front of him, having given himself insufficient time to copy out his part. This led to an awkward post-show encounter with the Emperor Joseph II, who’d spotted the deception through his opera glasses…)

Seeing Arvo Pärt on a programme is always guaranteed to raise the spirits.
 
Pärt is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. His style is minimalist, employing a compositional technique, tintinnabuli, that he himself invented. Of tintinnabuli, Pärt has said it “is the mathematically exact connection from one line to another…tintinnabuli is the rule where the melody and the accompaniment…is one. One and one, it is one – it is not two.” The deceptively simple result of this unitarian logic is a music that bears a strong resemblance to Gregorian chant. There’s aural transcendence at work here – this is music that cuts to essence of the matter. Pärt again: “The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises – and everything that is unimportant falls away.” 
 
It’s his 1977 composition Fratres that will feature in Fenella Humphreys’ and Emma Abbate’s upcoming concert 15th September, a work of which it has been written ‘there seem to be all sorts of emotions simmering just below the surface. Dense, big, life-and-death emotions. Ancient spirituality. All of it affects you at such a gut level. It’s majestic. It’s minimalist.’ Small wonder then that The Daily Telegraph has described Pärt as possibly ‘the world’s greatest living composer’.