Tamsin Waley-Cohen Interview
This transcript is linked to both the podcast and video versions of this interview with the British-American violinst Tamsin Waley-Cohen.
The show notes are also linked!
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
I've just actually made my first big project that's kind of come out of the experience of being a parent, a mother, but it's also something I really want to talk about. I felt a lot of shame about struggling psychologically with becoming a mother so much at a time when it was for a lot of our family, it felt like the main good thing that was happening in the pandemic was there was this wonderful baby.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. I have been so inspired to discover the brilliant British-American Violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen’s wonderful discography and I so enjoyed this opportunity to talk to her about her creative life. She spoke to me about the debut of her sister’s violin concerto and you’ll hear about Freya Waley-Cohen’s earlier work Permutations. Tamsin has performed and recorded extensively with the great pianist and composer Huw Watkins and you’ll also be hearing short excerpts from their album “Reflection” including two works written for Tamsin: Huw’s Violin Sonata and the late Oliver Knussen’s Reflection. Tamsin also explored in some depth her ideas around motherhood and carers in general, the fascinating research about matrescence, and connected to that, her upcoming album with Cordelia Williams "Dreamscapes and Lullabies”. Tamsin is Artistic Director of the Two Moors Festival in the U.K. and she shared her thoughtful curation of the upcoming October programming. We also talked about the satisfaction and intensity of touring and her wholistic approach to playing the violin. Finally, Tamsin shared some powerful musical memories with some of her great mentors. You can watch the video on my YouTube or listen to the podcast, and I’ve also linked the transcript. Have a look at the show notes of this episode on my website, where you’ll find all the links.
Hi, Tamsin. I'm so glad you could join me here today. Thanks for this.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
It's a great pleasure. I'm delighted to be talking to you.
Leah Roseman:
I am in Canada and I simply, I didn't know, even though you've had this really great career and such an incredible discography, I've so enjoyed discovering your playing. And as a fellow violinist, I'm completely blown away by your artistry and your mastery. It's just astounding. So great. So I listened to a lot of what you've recorded. I did a deep dive into Reflection, but I wanted to actually start with your sister's pieces because it's so special that you have a sister who's a composer.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
It is really special. It's really special. I'm actually preparing a violin concerto, her violin concerto that she wrote for me that we're premiering in about two weeks at the Aldeburgh Festival. And that's kind of a dream that we've talked about since we were teenagers. We're really close as sisters, as friends, and we've worked together on a couple of other big projects as well. She wrote a string quartet for my string quartet when it existed, which was called Dust, which we toured a lot. And the other really big project, which was 10 years ago now, was Permutations, which was a music and architecture project also at Aldeburgh. And that was a work for six solo violin parts, which I recorded all of. And they were housed in these different sort of chambers within a bigger structure. And each door could be moved. So it was playful and invited the listener, the audience to move through the space and to discover and create their own experience of how the different voices interacted and their own kind of balance.
So there were also different acoustic surfaces on different sides of the door. And then we also recorded it. We recorded it kind of as a disc that you can just listen to and there's a solo version and another version with one live version of me and then five other pre-recorded versions that can be spread out around the hall. So that was a major, quite experimental project, but that ended up having quite a lot of life. It went to RIBA, which is the big architectural school here and the Royal Academy. So we've done a couple of things together and we can be quite direct with each other. And it's just wonderful to have such a personal, strong personal connection and understanding as you can really only have when you grow up together.
Leah Roseman:
I listened to the audio version and I was curious, have people performed it live with six violinists?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
That has never happened. That's never happened, but it could happen.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah. When I heard it, I sent it right away to somebody who I thought might be interested. And on that same EP, you have a solo work Unveil by Freya. It's very beautiful and very varied.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. So that is kind of the solo version of it. So within that, within Unveil, all of the material that's in Permutations is contained in there. So all these kind of different characters, there are sort of in a way like six different almost like characters in a play. Yeah. So Unveil contains all of that material. I often include that in solo recitals, for example, because of course many venues don't have those kind of tech capabilities or it's not always appropriate. So it's a really wonderful solo violin piece, which I highly recommend to other violinists. (Music: clip of Unveil)
Leah Roseman:
So I'm curious about when it's performed at the premiere when you had the architectural element. So were people just hearing it in terms of the choices they could make? They would walk through a door and then the balance would be different or is there more to it than that?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. So it was as big as a sort of large-ish room. I think it was like a hexagonal sort of shape and there were doors to each of the chambers or you could also stand in the middle. So it's kind of like a massive flat pack basically. And you could stand in the center and have all of the doors fully opened or fully closed and then hear all of the voices kind of equally. Or you could go into certain chambers and really get intensity of experience of that voice and then the other voices would be quieter.
And there was either the wood on one side or this kind of more absorbent sort of corrugated, almost like a kind of felt foamy felt surface on the other. And the speakers were actually embedded inside the wood. We were given the speakers by very sort of cutting edge sound company so that the sound was really like reverberating throughout the wood. So it was basically an infinite number of ways in which you could experience it and people were free to kind of move through. And of course there'd be other people also experiencing it at the same time. So that would be affecting how each person could interact with it. So it was sort of run on loop throughout the day. (Music: clip of Permutations)
Leah Roseman:
I want to ask about Freya's concerto, but before we get there, I was just thinking about this thing. At our National Gallery here in Ottawa, Canada, there's a beautiful audio installation in this old chapel. It's quite special. But I was thinking, what if there was a museum that just had these gallery spaces with music and wouldn't that be incredible?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
It would be really incredible. It would be really incredible. I think one of the things that we wanted to kind of invite people to think about and to really experience in a more tangible way was that whenever we experience music, it's in a space. It's in an acoustic, it's in architecture and how that affects your experience of the music and the way you feel and the way you interact with it. So that was kind of part of the thinking behind it. And of course there's very tangible dialogue with the music itself and the performance and the composer and that you're actually part of making the music by how you choose to move through it.
Leah Roseman:
Which is such a supportive argument for experiencing music live because of course, the way most of us experience music daily is not live in person anymore.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
That's right. That's right. And I still really... I'm lucky that I have had chances to record lots of different things and a very supportive label. And of course it enables artists to reach a much bigger audience than you could ever reach live. But there is that intangible magic which you can't really measure, but that you all feel when you're in the room together. And I think that experience, the intensity of going to a concert or a live event and being with other people and giving yourself over to that experience. I hope that most people after every concert I play will feel differently to how they felt than when they came into it. And it is a kind of communion of sorts. And I think that sense of community and sharing as well is extremely powerful and should never be underestimated.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of immersive experiences and bringing in new audiences, especially to kind of challenging music, like your sister's music is not, it's complex. It must really help for people to have more of a full body experience.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Oh definitely. I think so. I mean, it's one of the challenges that classical music world is always talking about. The traditional concert hall setup doesn't invite very much real interaction between the artists and the audience. And yet it is that interaction that live performance is all about creating something just for that moment that can never be recreated or recaptured in its essence. And I think certainly for new music, inviting people into that creative process and really making them part of it I hope is something that is appealing and is powerful. And I grew up, our mother is a sculptor and our father ran theaters with different kinds of arts around us. So I think I often also think in quite a theatrical way about things and separating the arts doesn't really make sense to me because actually we're always experiencing more than one of them all the time.
Obviously when you're in a concert hall, you're also experiencing the architecture, not only in terms of the sound, but how it makes you feel and all kinds of references and resonances that you might not necessarily be aware of, but they'll change how you feel as well.
And also I'm really interested in the other senses as well. So for example, Proust talks about the madeleine, the way smells or taste can conjure up different memories or different feelings. Essentially what we're dealing with all the time is feelings and there are so many different ways of kind of accessing them. But I guess it comes, this is a rather circuitous answer, but it all comes down to the fact that I really believe all kinds of music, what we're doing is we're telling emotional psychological stories using sound. And that's what it's kind of all about any way that can enhance that sense of storytelling and really give that kind of full body experience. It's got to be exciting.
Leah Roseman:
So Tamsin, when this podcast is released, it will be a few weeks after your premiere of your concerto.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Okay.
Leah Roseman:
What other performances do you have planned for that?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
So in the autumn, we will be taking it to Luxembourg for the Rainy Days Festival with the Luxembourg Phil. They're also one of the co-commissioners. And it will also be on the radio, Radio Three. And then next year we will be taking it to Warsaw. And then there's some other things sort of TBC. So I'm hoping that over the next few years it will reach more and more audiences.
Leah Roseman:
And it's for full symphony orchestra?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
It's full symphony orchestra. Yeah. And it's full movement work, half an hour work. So it's a really major, major piece.
Leah Roseman:
We so need concertos by women as violinists, I have to say.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yes. Yes. There are not many.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I look forward to hearing it. Well, let's move over to Reflection. I so enjoyed this beautiful project. And actually this portrait of you and Huw on the cover, it's very special. Did you have an idea for that or the photographer kind of...
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
We worked with a really legendary photographer called Steve Gullick, who I met through a friend of mine's mother had an artist studio in the same building. And he took a lot of really well-known photos of, for example, Nirvana back in the day, very much part of that kind of rock scene. So you kind of turn up with his studio and you just try loads of different things, but he's got such an imagination and always manages to kind of capture something very special. So that was really, I would say that's very much Steve's work.
Leah Roseman:
So the first piece on the album by Oliver Knussen is the composition Reflection. I met him a couple of times a number of years ago. I was a Tanglewood Fellow and he sort of ran the new music festival. So we worked with him a lot as conductor and he was so passionate about new music. And for me, I was 20 at the time and it was sort of my first exposure to a lot of new compositions and it really made a big impact on me. And later on, he came and conducted our orchestra and worked with us. So what was your relationship with him?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
I actually met Olly through Freya. So Freya got to know him through the Royal Academy and he was very important teacher and mentor and friend to her. And I was given an opportunity when I won the Echo Award, which is the European Concert Halls Award, basically a carte blanche to commission a concert piece, new concert piece from anyone I wanted, but for the following season. So it's quite short notice, but also a kind of unbelievable opportunity for young artists. And I was thinking about who to commission and talking to Freya about it. And I knew that Olly hadn't written anything for quite a while. And she said, "I think if you talk to him, he might like to write something that is more personal and has that kind of personal connection. He and Huw were also very close and Huw had worked with him a lot, both as a composer and as a performer.
So I wrote to Olly and he wrote back straight away saying that he would really love to do it as long as he got a good idea. And we met a number of times for dinners or lunches and to talk about ideas and he listened to my recordings and came to hear me.
And that's really how the piece came to be. (Music: clip of Reflection)
Leah Roseman:
So this piece on the recording was originally for orchestra and violin?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
No, it was originally for violin and piano.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. I misunderstood. Okay.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
It was originally for violin and piano. And then some of the themes of it he put into a piece he was working on when he died, which was for orchestra.
Leah Roseman:
I see. He died quite young. It was such a loss.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. He's still very, very much missed.
Leah Roseman:
So Huw Watkins, Violin Sonata. Did he write this for you?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yes, he did. He did. I've been working with Huw for more than 20 years now actually. He's kind of like my musical big brother. I met him when I was a teenager and he was a fellow composition fellow at the Royal College of Music. And then when I started to get more kind of proper recitals with slightly more proper fees in my early 20s, I invited him to play with us and play with me. And we've been playing together really ever since. So it's absolutely wonderful to have this sonata from him. And I really believe and I hope that it will be a piece that will very much enter into the violin repertoire. I think it's a fabulous recital piece and it can sit really well in so many programs. Huw's music is beautiful, it's lyrical, it's challenging, it's virtuosic. It's straight from the heart.
The first movement begins with these kind of open fifths on the violin, extremely delicate and the hint of like these sort of shimmering dances in the piano. And then it opens out. The violin has this soaring melody and then slowly we develop this kind of whirlwind dance with the violin and piano before the initial theme comes back slightly more involved.(Music: clip of 1st mvt Huw Watkins Violin Sonata) And then the second movement begins also with very, very slowly moving, beautiful melody, really so yearning and heartfelt, very poignant. (Music: clip of 2nd mvt Huw Watkins Violin Sonata)
And then faster section again demanding quite sort of increasing sort of wildness and sense of abandon (Music: clip of 2nd mvt Huw Watkins Violin Sonata) before a big climax where both of the instruments are kind of at the limits of their expressive possibilities right up there on the violin, huge chords on the piano. And then it ends in an absolutely gorgeous way, which I find so heartbreaking really. And then the final movement is again, it's a dance, really very playful. (Music: clip of 3rd mvt Huw Watkins Violin Sonata)Fades away at the end, suddenly into nothing. Very understated, elegant kind of ending. So yeah, it's hard to describe music in words really, isn't it?
Leah Roseman:
That was very poetic. Thank you. That was great. And you have one of the great masterworks for violin and piano on this Prokofiev's F minor sonata. And if people aren't familiar with it, they really need to listen to it. And the Stravinsky, so in terms of pairing Knussen's and Watkins' pieces, was it repertoire you'd played a lot with Huw?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
The Prokofiev we've taught a lot over the years and it's something that we wanted to record. To be honest, it took us a really long time to find the right program to record Reflection because it's a relatively short piece for disc. You know, between 60 and 75 minutes for a disc, but it's sort of eight or so minute piece. And we tried out lots of different kinds of program, but also quite a lot of the pieces that Olly had been very much inspired by we'd actually already recorded. So when Huw wrote his sonata, after we performed it a couple of times, I felt like that was a really natural pairing that there seemed to be a lot of dialogue between the two pieces. And then the Prokofiev also has that kind of fairytale quality and the great extremes of emotion, beauty, delicacy, but also brutality, despair. It runs the whole range of human experience. (Music: clip 1st mvt Prokofiev F minor Sonata)
And Stravinsky, I love Stravinsky, Huw loves Stravinsky, Olly absolutely loved Stravinsky and the Duo Concertante is one of his quirkiest works for sure for violin and piano and kind of full of black humor and things which are unexpected, sort of acerbic wit and a kind of clarity and cleanness in the sound world that seemed to interact very, very well also with the other works. And we felt that also having the two kind of British works and then the two older Russian works was very interesting to put them next to each other and that there was dialogue between all four different sound worlds which helped each illuminate the other. (Music: clip 1st mvt. Stravinsky Duo Concertante)
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And with Huw, I'll just point listeners, you've recorded so much great repertoire, Beethoven, Czech music and this complete CPE Bach Sonatas. I wanted to ask you about that.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. So the complete CPE Bach I recorded actually with James Bailleu.
Leah Roseman:
Oh sorry. Yes.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
That's okay. But with Huw, yes. The Dvorak, Janacek, Debussy, Respighi, Elgar, we've recorded Sibelius, Ravel, Poulenc, Beethoven as you say. Yeah, all sorts of things. The CPE Bach project was with James, who's a wonderful collaborative pianist and a really dear friend of mine as well. And I got interested in CPE Bach's works. It's really unlike anything else I'd ever played before because it's like he's completely thrown out the rule books. Anything could happen at any time. And some of it sounds like it's a hundred years or more ahead. It's deeply psychological in that some of it sounds like a kind of musical version of someone having a total sort of breakdown or complete sudden changes of mood that are much more like what you'd expect from Schuman than someone writing in the mid 1700s. And he was so highly regarded in his time.He would have been the Bach that people really knew.
And his influence on Mozart, of course, and the development of a classical style Mozart said about him, "he is the father, we are the children". Historically, he sits right there in the Enlightenment and he died the year of the French Revolution. So it's a time where people's ideas are what it means to be human and the idea of free will and all of these ideas are just exploding so much change in the way people think at that time. And I think that's really captured in his music. And he was fascinated by the development of instruments as well. So for example, he wrote a piece for Harpsichord and I think it was the latest version of sort of piano sort of clavichord kind of instrument or pianoforte kind of instrument, early pianoforte kind of instrument. And James and I felt like he would have loved hearing his music also on modern instruments and of course with respect to tastes and stylistic considerations, but thrilling to bring the colors of modern instruments to that music as well.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Many years ago I played one of his sonatas and I didn't realize he'd written so many. I was curious about performance practice and your studies. Had you done any Baroque violin before or how did that work for you?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
I have not formally studied Baroque violin, but I've always been really, really interested and loved listening to period performers. And I use it in my practice kind of as research, not only the Baroque bow. I mean, I actually used almost like a classical bow for those recordings, which I used quite a lot for earlier in classical repertoire. But also putting the gut strings on, which I actually think is more informative than the bow because the way the gut strings react and the way that you need to use the bow to get sound out, the articulations which are available to you, the textures which are available are completely different to steel strings. And that's the place where it really sort of opened my imagination as to the kind of colors, textures, expressions, articulations, which would have been possible on the gut strings. And then to look for not recreations of that, but to have those down from my ear while I'm practicing and thinking about how to bring the expression of the music to life on my modern instrument.
So it's something that's always really interested me and I've listened a lot and I've read a lot and I've tried out different things. And I suppose in the end, I always come back to that because we're musicians, sound is our medium and through sound we have to say everything. So the more different kinds of sound and expression we can find, the more we can say and the more we can hopefully move people. And I think that's part of that. Exploring different stylistic ways and different approaches to the instrument is all feeds into that.
Leah Roseman:
So let's talk about being a mother and get into it.
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. please note I’ve linked a few suggested episodes in the show notes for you: with Sarah Jeffery of Team Recorder, the Euclid Quartet with a discussion of a chamber music career, pianist and author Jeeyoon Kim, clarinettist Tasha Warren who also talked about her chamber music career and motherhood, and the acclaimed Canadian pianist and visual artist Christina Petrowska Quilico among so many episodes since 2021. Sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, consider buying me a coffee on my Ko-fi page, or buying some unique podcast merch. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Tamsin.
My kids are now well into their 20s. and when people ask me how I can have this podcast and be a full-time performer and do all this, I say, well, my kids have grown up. So you're in the thick of it right now.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And I understand it was the early pandemic days and you had a really rough time with your, was it your first child?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah, that's right. So she was born just at the beginning of the long... We had a long winter lockdown, the end of 2020 through to May, end of May 2021. So she was born in December 2020. And there were a lot of things about the pandemic that also definitely added to the kind of anxiety and isolation that I felt that I think is also very common without a pandemic for many mothers to feel. But of course, there's a lot of fear about how COVID might affect unborn children and the situation in hospitals was not good. It was very, very severely understaffed and partners couldn't stay. So a lot of things which were really challenging. And then the shock also of having a new baby when you've...
I'd always had autonomy over my life and my body and what I'd always been able to find if I wanted to do something to find a way to do it or solve a problem. And it's not like that with a new baby. You have to surrender yourself and really learn to be surrendering to that being in the present in a way that I really hadn't before. And I found it really, really, really hard, very hard. Yeah. I mean, I felt like I had been sort of totally obliterated by having baby and getting back to playing that spring was really helpful for me. I mean, I would never say find a way back to myself because I don't think that's what it is at all. It's almost like when a caterpillar goes into a chrysalis and then becomes a butterfly, it's not actually just growing wings.
It's sort of completely disintegrating and then becoming something else feels much more like that for me. But it was really tough and I really struggled. I was quite depressed. She didn't sleep. She was not an easy baby at all. And I had also a very traumatic birth, so I was very anxious.
Without a doubt, having children has been the biggest learning curve of my life in so many ways, in so many ways. And I've just actually made my first big project that's kind of come out of the experience of being a parent, a mother, but it's also something I really want to talk about. It would have helped me so much to hear more people talking about it. I think that in the last six years, there's a lot more conversation about matrescence. Lucy Jones' book has now come out. Matrescence is even included as a word in some dictionaries in the last couple of years, not all, but some, not feeling so much kind of... I felt a lot of shame about struggling psychologically with becoming a mother so much at a time when it was, for a lot of our family, it felt like the main kind of good thing that was happening in the pandemic was what there was this wonderful baby.
And also talking about how caring for my children has actually changed my artistic practice for the better. There's so much that I grew up with and is in our Western culture about how creativity and care for young children cannot and should not coexist.That the pram in the hallway is the greatest enemy of great art. Tracy Emin saying there are great artists that have children, they're called men.
And my husband does a lot of care and I know many fathers now are so much more involved and that they also gain a huge amount from that. So yeah, that's kind of a long answer.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. What is this word matrescence, this book? I don't know about it.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Okay. So Lucy Jones is a, she was a nature writer and journalist. And after, I think it was after her third child, she wrote a book called "Matrescence", which has really had a huge impact here. And I know it's been published in the States as well. Matrescence is what happens to the mother's brain when she's pregnant and in the early years and actually goes on for many years through caring for children. And it's as big a change as what happens in adolescence, but it happens much more quickly. And there are studies now, very belatedly, these studies coming out really in the last handful of years, maximum 10 years, which documents how the mother's brain really changes and optimizes for care. And they're really fundamental changes to the actual gray matter. And anyone caring for a small child also will have changes in their brain. So fathers who do a lot of care or same sex couples also will experience these changes.
And it's about documenting that and in really granular detail referencing both sort of biological and sociological studies. It was a term that was actually coined I think in the '70s. Dana Raphael in the 1970s and the clinical psychologist Dr. Aurélie Athan is looking at the very, very complex neurological, biological, sociological sort of shifts in identity that happen when you become a parent and particularly when you become a mother because obviously there are biological changes which happen when you're pregnant. And they also affect your brain in a tangible way that you can see on brain scans.This conversation is vital in putting care. Imagine how dystopian the world would be if everyone stopped caring for everyone else and yet it's so denigrated. It's considered lowly, it's low status, it's badly paid. Care is central to our survival. It's what makes us able to be functioning humans and go out into the world.
And I really want to be part of the conversation that I hope shifts that perspective and gives more value and importance to care.
Leah Roseman:
And I understand another book that really influenced you is Julie Phillips, "The Baby on the Fire Escape"?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yes. Have you read it?
Leah Roseman:
I have not, but I was reading about it.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. It really influenced me. I actually read it before I had children, so quite a while ago now, but it had a huge influence on me seeing how and reading about how different women, artists, writers managed the challenge of having children and working and the ways in which that was obstructed. And that many women in the past felt they had to give up their children or give up their art and the ones that managed to find a way through how they did that and what the personal costs were to them. And it's a very, very though provoking book and I think well worth reading. I hope that there'll be also a way that people feel that they can be kind of fully recognized both as parents and as creative people, artists. It often feels like you need to deny one side of that to be taken seriously either as an artist or could have considered a good mother with all the connotations that that has of self-sacrifice and subsuming yourself.
There's a lot of conversations still to be had around that. (Music: clip of 3rd mvt Prokofiev F minor Sonata)
Leah Roseman:
So you mentioned, Tamsin, that you have a new project. Is this going to be unveiled soon?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. So actually we recorded it a week ago or 10 days ago and we performed it and also created an event around it at the Southbank Center here in London. And it's a project that's about nighttime care. So it's called "Dreamscapes and Lullabies". It started from a note that I had sort of written to myself and she was really small, which was about how I was finding that even though I was finding it so hard looking after her at night and the sleeplessness and the demands, the twenty four seven demands, that I was actually finding that what she was asking of me was almost the same as what the ideal is on stage of kind of that really engaging with those kind of animal instincts and surrendering yourself to the process, being completely in the moment, working with your instincts or being about kind of the feeling and calming myself so that she could be calmed as well.
Which parents who've experienced that will know that that's in a way the most important thing if you're trying to calm a baby. And that's so hard to do when you're a new mother. And as I said, I was very anxious. And when you're exhausted, it's also really hard to be calm and you're thinking I just desperately need to sleep. So just the acceptance of the process. So the project, at the Southbank on Saturday, we had a talk about the creative power of nighttime care with the pianist that I'm working with on this project, Cordelia Williams, who is wonderful soloist and collaborator, also a mother of three children. And she also writes particularly on transcendence and music. So she's undertaking a fellowship with, I think it's Duke University at the moment on that. And the writer and broadcaster, Octavia Bright, who is also the author of "This Ragged Grace".
So we had a discussion about that with Caroline Walker's, two of her oil paintings which she allowed us to use projected behind us of night feeds. She's a wonderful artist who is having her first major solo exhibitions here at the moment. And she paints a kind of huge history scale oil paintings of the domestic world and looking after children, which are beautifully realized with so much tenderness and care. And then I created a soundscape of kind of the night of looking after small children. So the white noise and the snuffling and the shushing and the lullabies and the crying and the singing and all those different kinds of sound, nappy changes and all those kind of different sounds. And then the concert opens with Arvo Pärt's Spiegel Im Spiegel some sense of surrender and allowing it to unfold to discover the beauty in the whole, but also the two parts which need each other to interact and have meaning.
And then Brahm's lullaby, Schubert's lullaby. My sister Freya also wrote a new lullaby for us, which was based on an ancient Babylonian text that I found which is considered thought to be the oldest lullaby text, which as well as soothing the child has as so many lullabies do, the darkness saying you've woken up her household gods who are now angry with you. That sort of sense of frustration. And then Nocturnes John Cage Nocturne, Scriabin Nocturne. Earlier in the program also Dvorak "The Songs my Mother Taught Me" all from my mother, which is so full of that yearning to be soothed in the way that you remember as a child being soothed by your mother and as an adult. Very, very hard to ever find that sense again and the yearning for that. And then at the center of the program is Schubert's Fantasie, which is like a huge dreamscape with these ideas that keep coming back and metamorphizing and going off into unexpected places, all the extremes of motion that it contains and finishing with Schuman'ns Abendlied.
So it's very loving wish for a good peaceful night. So that is this next big project. And I hope that it will be something that we'll take to many other places, but it was wonderful to realize it fully at the Southbank. And we also, I'd set the stage. They obviously have wonderful sort of tech team there. So we had a moon and stars as well during the concert, as well as obviously the normal stage lighting. So very atmospheric and I hope really brought people into that intense world of the night and night care.
Leah Roseman:
That Schubert Fantasie is one of my favorite works and it's very difficult. So I can see how that works with the other more lyrical and simpler repertoire. That's really brilliant actually.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Thank you. I hope you'll enjoy the project when it comes out. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
In becoming a mother and having these demands, you've had to certainly say no to lots of projects, delegate more and maybe let go of some ways you used to do things when you were younger because you were touring a lot when you were
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Younger. That's right. Definitely. I mean, I used to just be away all the time and I don't want to do that anymore. So I love playing concerts. I love playing. It's like my oxygen. When I'm not playing, I need it whether that's because I've been doing it since I was three years old, so for 37 years, or because that's why I wanted to do it in the first place. It's the way the world makes sense to me. But I also want to be here and be present for my children. So I've really tried to change the way that I structure my schedule. I try to really take on projects that I feel really matter and that I offer a very personal perspective on them. I've been doing also more commissioning and creating of new works and really making sure that also the projects that I do, we try and repeat them lots of times.
It's sort of ironic in a way that through my 20s and early 30s, trying to build up lots of international work. And now I do still work internationally, but I don't want to be away every week. So I'm doing a bit more in the UK and then sort of a few bigger international trips a year.
And finding that balance is really challenging. I was lucky also that I took on an artistic directorship of a festival here in 2020. So that gave me a different way of kind of channeling my creativity through the programming of that. Also when they were really babies, I also had the experience of actually not being able to play, not with the first one because of the pandemic. Second one, I had to actually cancel a lot more than I was planning because my hands really swelled up and I just couldn't play. Then I also, instead of thinking that a baby was just going to be another thing on my to - do list, realized that I would need to build my schedule back more slowly with the second one. So I just was more careful with what I did in the first period of going back on stage when she was still very small.
Leah Roseman:
And let's talk about the Two Moors Festival. So in terms of the programming for this year, I understand it'll be in October and you're going to reveal it later this week as we record it. But when people hear the podcast, you will have already revealed this. So do you want to talk about this year's programming?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Absolutely. Yeah. So the Two Moors Festival is a festival that covers Two Moors, Exmoor and Dartmoor, which are the two huge national parks across the Southwest of England. It's a really unusual festival, because it covers such a huge geographical range. It's almost like two different festivals and they're both very, very rural areas, not very densely populated. It was begun 25, 26 years ago now in the wake of the foot and mouth epidemic to bring something positive to the area. And I have a personal connection with the area because my father's family have had... Well, he grew up and has a home on Somerset, so on Exmoor.
So I spent all my childhood summers there. This year we have as ever quite a varied program. So it's chamber music, it's song, it's Baroque music, it's folk. We're opening with actually a Haydn salon. I introduced a few years ago this sort of recreation of particular moments of time or kind of worlds, musical worlds. So the first one we did was when I did a whole festival about friendship and I created a whole day that was kind of about Clara Schumann and the circle that she brought around her. So this one is about Haydn and we have also a major choral and community event with our Armonico Consort, the Baroque Choir and group with over 200 school children in Exeter cathedral. So they'll be participating in the concert and it's called Supersize Polyphony. So it's in kind of surround sound. So singers will be moving around and surrounding the audience in different ways through the concert.
So that will be Spem in Alium Tallis and Monteverdi and Hildegard von Bingen and a new work by Buckley.
We also have the new Mark-Antony Turnage Quartet, the English premiere with the Calidore Quartet. Adrian Brendall's playing, James Bailleu's playing, Rachel Podger and Lucy Horsch are bringing their new DuoLogs program. Wonderful Barack players. Absolutely love Rachel's playing. Huge fan of hers. She'Koyokh, the Klezmer and Balkan band are doing a dance workshop and an evening event. We've also co-commissioned a new song cycle along with Ryedale and Aldeburgh and Sheffield Chamber Music Festivals from Gavin Higgins called Speak of the North, which is about Northern identity. That's with Claire Booth and Christopher Glenn. Claire and I are also performing Kafka Fragments by Kurtag, celebrating Hundred Years, his birthday, which we've been touring and doing quite a lot over the last couple of years. Caroline Taylor, the young soprano will also be joining us. We have our young musicians, competition winners. We have our rising stars from our residency, which happens in the autumn.
Jaren Ziegler and Tomos Boyles, wonderful viola and piano duo. Already can hear them on the major stages here. Really exciting to be introducing them to our audience. Steven Osborne is coming and playing a wonderful recital, including Beethoven's Diabelli variations. Michael Collins is giving a clarinet recital with Noriko Ogawa. We have also family concerts, concerts for babies, which I'm giving.
So all kinds of different things. Also talks.Lawrence Sail and Julia Copus are reading poetry. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, who's the art correspondent for The Times for 20 years in conversation with me and the artist, Laura Pitman, about the meaning and the point of art. So lots of different kinds of things happening throughout the festival.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful to hear. So your concert for babies, what does that look like?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Last year, Gamba and vocal duo. It's in a beautiful venue called The Hall in Exeter. And it's really introducing them to the violin, playing them some different things, letting them get up close to it, be free to just experience music and move around. And also I hope really enjoyable for the mothers, kind of sociable. I think there's definitely not enough of that kind of thing that happens when you've got a small child to look after. It's really nice to go to something that's not just baby music, but babies respond amazingly to all kinds of music. So it's great to play to them.
Leah Roseman:
When my kids were young, there was something I really enjoyed. There's a International Children's Theatre Festival here. And a lot of these actors, they're doing pieces without any language and they perform internationally because it's not necessarily mime. Sometimes it's sort of nonsense language or just physical theater. It was really interesting to see the range. And it was wonderful because it was really all ages. So you could... Yeah, that's a really cool art form.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
That sounds amazing. That sounds really cool.
Leah Roseman:
We had talked earlier about your commission from Olly Knussen and winning the Echo Award. So I was curious because that really helped launch your career more internationally, what that experience was like.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. I was absolutely an amazing experience. I got to tour and play in pretty much all the major concert halls across Europe. Yeah. I think it really, as you say, kind of put me on the scene in a different way. Unfortunately, it was also the year of Brexit. So every single press interview was about that. Yeah, given that it's a European concert hall and I was a British artist. I really love touring. It's a really thrilling kind of learning curve with every performance, understanding of the works and how to also turn up for them on stage and communicate them, think deepens and is enriched. There's really nothing else like it. I think it's the best way to learn and get under the skin of pieces. And playing night after night, I actually really enjoy that. I really love the intensity of touring, especially when I know that it's not going to go on indefinitely unlike looking after a baby at night.
But it was a fantastic year. It was from the historic venues like the Concertgebouw, Musikverein to the beautiful new halls like in Luxembourg. Went to so many different places. And also getting to know some of the other co-winners, just a fantastic thing for young artists to be able to do. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
It strikes me that the only reason really to do competitions is to have performance experiences.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Competitions. Yeah. Although it's very different because in competitions you are being judged. Whereas hopefully for most people, when they go to a concert, they're not there to judge you. They're there to experience something and to be moved and to enjoy the music. And I think psychologically that's a huge difference for the performer.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of what can be a toxic perfectionism, how did you deal with that as a young person doing competitions?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
I didn't really do many competitions because I found it psychologically quite destructive for me. And I was also aware of the conversations that went on between teachers and jury members behind the scenes and I didn't want to be part of that. It made me actually really feel very like I didn't want to be part of a world where that was what it was about. Yeah. It was really important for me to get back to just playing normal concerts and playing chamber music, which has always been really great love for me to kind of have faith in the music world again. So that's quite an extreme reaction, but for me it really was like that. In terms of the sort of toxic perfectionism, I think that is a real issue in any kind of practice which demands such a high level of skill. And it's kind of a paradox because you need to work on having such a high level of technical skill and facility in order to then be able to let go of that and not think about it and be free of the kind of perfectionism so that you can actually create art.
And that's the kind of difficult balance between the craft of being a musician and the art of making music. And I think it's something that... Well, I think about it a lot and I know it's something that a lot of students, I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this many times, really struggle with because perfectionism can be so stifling and strangling. And yet you need to essentially be constantly critiquing yourself in order to improve and to find solutions and become a better practitioner. So I don't know exactly what the solution is except for that I feel one of the things we talked about a lot actually in my quartet was how to kind of free ourselves from worrying about perfection and allow ourselves to become a kind of vessel for the music, but also almost embrace mistakes in that often the mistakes happen when you're really risking something.
It's that kind of catastrophe beauty at the edge of catastrophe, which can become a kind of ideal to take it so far and to give so much.
And I think holding that in mind as a possibility is really powerful and trusting that you over the years have put in enough work that you can rely on your technique to carry you through and you don't have to think about it anymore, but that it's totally kind of absorbed within you. I mean, there's no cheating time is there in practicing in studying music and just turning up for the great masterpieces or any music that you're working and learning every day. There's just no cheating time. You just need to turn up and be there and be present and see what you discover and see what it says to you every day. I think recognizing that is also really important that it's always a process. There's never a finished product. There's no such thing as a finished product. It just doesn't exist. A recording is just a snapshot of where you are at that time.
And always keep developing and keep searching. Accepting that that's the reality of the work of being musician I think is very, very important. (Music: clip of Stravinsky 5th mvt Duo Concertante)
Leah Roseman:
Has your routine changed over the years in terms of how you approach staying in shape technically?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yes. I need to be a lot more efficient in my practice now because I have a lot less time. Luckily I also put in a lot of practice in my teens and my 20s and my early 30s. So I have good foundations which are there. I think I tend to play some Bach. Most days if I'm feeling really out of shape, I'll just go back to the sort of Paganini and Bach, which will kind of pull me back into shape quite quickly. And also just always awareness of my posture and my breathing and my sort of openness physically that I have that fluidity and flexibility. It's not just about the hands. It's also about my core and my lower back and how I'm holding the whole of myself. So I think that full body awareness is really essential because it is a bodily thing to play an instrument.
Leah Roseman:
You've had some great mentors over the years. Did you want to talk about any of your teachers?
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. I studied at the Royal College with Itzhak Rashkovsky, who I studied with for many years. I also, from my teens, went to Prussia Cove, which was a huge influence on me. I saw Kurtag teaching and I would always sit in on Gábor Takács's classes. And with my quartet, we also played for him. András Keller. was really, really important for me, really important teacher and musician. He sort of completely opened doors in my imagination and in my sense of what music could be. The other thing about Prussia Cove is in the autumn there's open chamber music and I got to play quartets with some of the great musicians of older generations. And that was really where I learned in a way the most sitting beside them, seeing how they played, how they worked on music, how they discussed it, how to give, how to be malleable, how to really listen in a really profound way.
I think Prussia Cove is probably still my biggest influence. But Ruggiero Ricci was also someone who was really, really important to me in my teens. He was probably the first person who really believed in me and also said to my parents that he thought that I had something really special.
And it wasn't even a specific thing that he taught me, but just a sense of being with him and that he believed that I could do anything that I wanted to do on the violin, that there shouldn't be any obstacles. And in a way he made everything so simple, brought it right down to its kind of essence, whether it was sort of Mozart or Tchaikovsky or whatever it was that we were working on. And that was also so revealing because often teachers make things really, really complicated and tell you five things about every note and then you can't play anything. And it was almost the opposite with him. He was a very, very generous person.
Someone else who is really important to me is a pianist, Stephen Kovacevich who I've known for about 15 years now. And he is a dear friend and mentor and I still go to play for him. And some of my most precious music making experiences are with him at the piano in Beethoven and Brahms Sonatas. He so rigorous and demands such a level of intensity and understanding from every moment and every note just for me, sort of unsurpassed musician. So he's someone that I think about things that he's said to me really every day in my practice.
Leah Roseman:
That's wonderful to hear. Oh yeah. This piece that you're performing with Colin Currie, the percussionist, Tüür's Memoirs for violin, percussion and string orchestra. I was curious that the composer was interesting in the nature of memory.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
Yeah. I didn't know that's what he was going to write when we commissioned him, but it came to be a piece that was quite retrospective kind of looking back through his life and a sense of things kind of shimmering and memories coming and going. It opens with this incredible kind of shimmering remember first movement with melodies that kind of emerge. We pass this shimmering thing back and forth and melodies kind of emerge. I'd really wanted to work with Colin for a long time and it was wonderful that Erkki-Sven Tüür agreed to write this piece for us, which we premiered last autumn and we are playing some more next year also. But I didn't commission him to write something about memory that came from I think what he was feeling in his life and looking back through his career as he is now in his 70s.
So it's a really, really touching, beautiful place, but also very playful. The last movement is very playful. So it's not sad at all.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you so much for this today, Tamsin. Really appreciate it.
Tamsin Waley-Cohen:
No, thank you so much for having me. It's really wonderful and a great admirer of what you've created with this podcast. Thank you. Yeah, long may it continue.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
