Interview, Fenella Humphreys on Caprices

Four years after winning the Instrumental prize at the BBC Music Magazine Awards for the second volume of her Bach 2 The Future project (for which the British violinist commissioned a set of new unaccompanied works to perform alongside JS Bach's solo sonatas and partitas), Fenella Humphreys is back with an equally intrepid album centring on the caprice form. Featuring works by Paganini, Bacewicz, Kreisler and Tom Coult, plus new commissions by Seonaid Aitken, Laurence Osborn and Oliver Leith, Caprices also includes the world premiere recording of a composite set of variations on Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, with contributors including Sally Beamish, James Joslin, Alexandra Harwood and Stuart MacRae.

In between preparations for a performance of Clara Schumann's Piano Trio with Martin Roscoe and Jessica Burroughs earlier this month, Fenella spoke to me via Zoom about how the project was partly inspired by laying childhood demons to rest, the friendships which have grown out of her passion for commissioning new music, and how crowdfunding the recording added a fascinating extra dimension to the creative process...

Photo credit: Alejandro Tamagno.

What was the impetus for this project?

It was a double-edged thing. The very first seed was sown a long time ago, when a violin teacher I had as a kid said ‘You can’t play Paganini!’…I believed him, and I avoided Paganini like the plague for all of my student days. Then a few years ago somebody asked me to do a concert of the 24 Caprices, and I thought ‘It’s time to banish these monsters. It’s not that I can’t play them - it’s that somebody once told me that I couldn’t play them, so why not go all-out and tackle them head-on?!’. The concert actually ended up being cancelled, but I’d already started working on the music so doing something with them was always in the back of my mind.

The other side of things began when Sam Wigglesworth at Faber sent me a copy of Tom Coult’s 4 Études. I really like Tom’s music, but life always gets in the way with things that you don’t actually have to do, so they sat on my shelf until Sam prodded me again! I was blown away by how good they were and was keen to programme them, but I wanted to make sure it was part of something where I’d get to perform them quite a lot – not least because they’re really hard! The more you perform these kinds of pieces, the more you get under the music’s skin and the better you perform it.

Working on Tom’s pieces alongside the Paganini got me thinking about caprices generally: I play the Kreisler Recitative and Scherzo-Caprice a lot, and knew that there were enough others out there to make a really interesting bite-size programme. Often when you see an album of caprices coming out you expect it to be very serious and virtuosic, but I wanted to avoid that and include pieces that I just enjoy playing. I also love commissioning things, and that became an important element of the project too: one commission turned into four, and then loads of composer friends wrote me a variation each for the 24 Paganini Variations, so it got slightly out of hand!

Were all of the composers you approached people who were well known to you already?

They’ve all come from different places: one composer is a long-standing mate, and the other pieces have brought some brilliant people into my life. That’s one of the things I love about commissioning - you form these amazing relationships with people you might not otherwise have met. Freya Waley-Cohen’s piece Caffeine was originally a recorder piece, which was premiered by Tabea Debus: I was at the first performance at a Listenpony concert at Crypt on the Green, and both Tabea and the piece were absolutely fantastic. Afterwards I’d had a couple of beers, so I went over to Freya (whom I’d not met before) and asked if there was any chance of her turning it into a violin piece…Following a conversation on Twitter she did exactly that, and I’m so grateful to her.

Just a few weeks earlier I’d been to Hermes Experiment’s birthday concert (also at Crypt on the Green) where they played Oliver Leith’s Uh Huh Yeah. It was one of those pieces that immerses you in such an incredible sound-world that it keeps infecting your mind – I couldn’t forget how it made me feel in the concert, so I got in touch and asked if he’d be up for writing me a Caprice.

Laurence Osborn’s a mate of my boyfriend’s, so I’d met him and really fallen in love with some of his music - he was the first person I actually commissioned for the project, because I knew he’d write something that would work really well for this project even though I had no idea what it would end up being. We’d had a very random conversation on someone’s Twitter thread about Cornershop's Brimful of Asha which we’d both ended up listening to on loop and boogying around our living-rooms to because it was so good! I suggested he write something based on that; it ended up turning into something totally different, but it all started with 90s pop!

Seonaid Aitken’s piece at the end of the disc came out of a different project entirely, a programme I’d been asked to put together related to Scotland or Ireland. I’ve known Seonaid for years: she introduced me to all sorts of Scottish fiddle music and taught me all kinds of reels when we were much younger, so I asked her for something to finish the concert and she wrote this set which starts with a stunning air and goes off into a whole load of reels.

How much contact do you like to have with composers during the gestation-period of a new piece?

I’ll work however the composer wants to work. Some people will constantly be sending you little snippets that you record and send back to them, others will send me sections and want to do a workshop, and with other people I won’t see anything until the finished work appears in my inbox! Of course we’ll have conversations if things don’t quite work or I don’t quite understand what they’re getting at, but it’s seldom that I ask someone to write for me who doesn’t know my playing on some level so there’s usually a certain understanding there already.

Were you thrown any technical curveballs to equal Paganini in the new pieces?!

Oh, there were things that were much harder! The Paganini caprices (especially the ones on the album) are all totally playable – they’re difficult, but everything fits so well underneath your fingers. A lot of the composers I commissioned do have some experience of being violinists themselves so nothing went right over the edge, but there were a lot of things that are just technically so much harder than anything that appears in Paganini. I did feel that everything in the commissions was completely integral to the music, though: there was no point in any of the works where the virtuosity was just thrown on top for effect. I think that’s where things get really difficult and frustrating, when you know that somebody’s just trying to be clever or to write something that sounds technically impressive but doesn’t quite fit the music or your fingers.

So often simple is in any case better: unless you really know what you’re doing, a lot of extended techniques don’t entirely make sense. For instance, so often somebody will send you some music that uses microtones but when you try it out it just sounds like there’s the occasional out-of-tune note! But if you look at Oliver Leith’s piece Goat Head on the album, it’s an absolute masterclass in how to use microtones because everything’s there for an absolute reason – it’s such clever writing.

How detailed a brief did you give the composers who contributed to the set of short variations on Paganini?

I literally just said ‘Do you fancy writing me a 16-bar variation on Paganini’s 24th Caprice?’ and everyone said yes! Initially I just asked a bunch of friends, and later on a couple of people I didn’t know so well came on board - people who really didn’t need to do it, but were kind enough to write me something. It was really interesting to see all of the different responses once they started coming back: some people had taken the 16 bars of Paganini as a guide and written their own 16 bars with a similar harmonic progression, some had taken a little fragment and written something based on that, and others had left Paganini out over there and gone their own way! James Joslin literally cut up Paganini’s own caprice bar by bar and tried out different orders, rhythms and harmonies - so it’s all Paganini, but Paganini stuck together in different ways!

There’s such a range of language as you go through them, and it took a lot of work to put that jigsaw-puzzle together. Take Alexandra Harwood’s variation that’s in memory of the Holocaust: you’d have to be very careful what you put either side of that because something like Héloïse Werner’s chirpy variation would feel terribly wrong, but they’re both such wonderful variations in their own right. Finding the right order actually took me longer than recording the pieces!

What’s the story behind the dedications for each variation?

A lot of the money for the recording was raised through crowdfunding, and it’s quite difficult to figure out what people are going to want as rewards in that situation: I’d done this for my 2015 project where I again commissioned works to go alongside solo Bach, and as one of the rewards Cheryl Frances-Hoad offered to take somebody’s name and turn it into a short piece of music for solo violin that I would then record. That was such a fun thing, and we saw loads of people donating just so they could get one of Cheryl’s pieces, but I couldn’t ask a composer to do that again because it was so much work for her.

Because we had a finite number of variations, I came up with the idea of offering a dedication on the CD for each variation of Paganini and for each of the new variations, so that there was a tangible reward for the people who donated to the KickStarter. And as with the variations themselves, it was so fascinating to see the range of dedications as they came in - from the person thanking the teacher who got him into music when he was very young to a couple of really heart-breaking memorials to people who’d died. It was a real mixture, and fitting dedications to variations was another piece of the jigsaw: for instance, it would feel very inappropriate to put a dedication to someone who’s died on one of the sparky, cheeky variations.

We hear the phrase ‘a very personal project’ so often in relation to new recordings, but it really does seem to fit the bill on various levels here…

This recording means more to me than anything else I’ve done – the Bach things were very important to me, but I poured everything I have into this one and I have it to thank for a lot of things. The project really kept me going during the beginning of lockdown: although the recording was delayed obviously by COVID, just knowing that it was coming meant I had to stay fit!