Acclaimed composer Eleanor Alberga dishes on Bartok, Messiaen and more
Composer and pianist Eleanor Alberga
With her 2015 Last Night of the Proms opener ARISE ATHENA! Eleanor Alberga cemented a reputation as a composer of international stature. Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Chorus and conducted by Marin Alsop, the work was heard and seen by millions.
Her music is not easy to pigeon-hole. The musical language of her opera LETTERS OF A LOVE BETRAYED (2009), premiered at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury stage, has drawn comparisons with Berg’s Wozzeck and Debussy’s Pelleas, while her lighter works draw more obviously on her Jamaican heritage and time as a singer with the Jamaican Folk Singers and as a member of an African Dance company. But the emotional range of her language, her structural clarity and a fabulously assured technique as an orchestrator have always drawn high praise.
We sat down with Eleanor to talk about her career, her artistry, and classical music as a whole.
Can you tell us about two musicians who have inspired your own artistry?
I find it impossible to choose only 2 musicians. I would say Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Birtwistle have had the biggest impact as composers. Working as a pianist in a duo with my husband Thomas Bowes inspired me and made me grow as a performer and this also filtered into my composing.
What do you think needs to be done to improve growing classical music audiences for live concerts? Or is it fine the way it is at the moment?
No, it’s not fine! While lots of wonderful people are doing marvellous work to give children access to serious art music in their education, music still sits on the margins of the ‘serious’ curriculum - as does dance. I think this is a big mistake.
All the research shows that children with a measure of serious music in their lives learn better all round. Why haven’t we picked up on this yet? They don’t have to go on to be pros themselves but will certainly be better human beings for it and will have all sorts of skills of language and sociability introduced to them as well as a treasure trove to explore fearlessly at a later time in their lives.
I am dismayed that we now feel above all worried about entertaining children or losing their interest. Give them the best! My mother ran her own school in Jamaica and she certainly didn’t hold back on the classics. I fear we will lose a greater part of our humanity if education is forever unbalanced in favour of sciences only.
The London Schools Symphony Orchestra (LSSO) recently performed your musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Barbican, 25 years after the work’s premiere by the London Philharmonic and Franz Welser-Möst. Can you tell us a little about the piece?
The commission, which arrived quite out of the blue, was to set one of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. I chose his uproarious version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs partly as I identified a little with this rather lonely but resourceful girl and partly - and more mischievously - because I am clearly not Snow White.
Dahl’s adaptation is naughty and irreverent, not to say downright anarchic at times. I loved that it was a million miles away from the rather wholesome Disney film that I’d grown up with. I also noticed that this story had a fabulous range of characters and a great opportunity to portray night-time as well as a wild party.
We came up with a concert Suite of the main dances from the complete score which I do hope will get taken up by more orchestras looking for shorter programme slots. Dahl’s master stroke was to recast the Dwarfs as jockeys and I remember having great fun writing a twelve-tone fugue and working in various horse-related themes at the moment they get into the story.
The end is pure celebration with Dahl’s wonderfully scandalous line, ‘gambling’s not a Sin, providing that you always win’, and I allowed myself a few references to dance fashions of the mid 90’s as well as other Jamaican elements to get the party going at the end. It’s all slightly mad – but as with the original Dahl tale I knew children would get its craziness and love it despite it being a highly sophisticated score. I hate the idea of making things simple because of worry that children might get bored!
The LSSO’s Artistic Director Peter Ash also recorded the work for the record label Orchid Classics alongside an all-star cast of narrators including Joanna Lumley, Griff Rhys Jones and Danny DeVito. Is it nice to see your piece under his direction once more?
It certainly is. Peter had conducted some of the earliest rehearsals of the piece in preparation for the premiere and I and others immediately sensed his understanding of what I was up to. I was trying to create something with lots of character and detail and so while the effect is very colourful this can only be achieved with a great understanding of how the various tiny events in the score accumulate to create the effect. Peter absolutely knows this and there probably isn’t anyone who knows this score as well as he.
What is the one thing you would like people to remember about your artistry?
That they were inspired by it. That time stood still a little as they listened.
What is your most cherished accomplishment so far?
Writing Snow White. Completing my Opera “Letters of a Love Betrayed’. Writing “Arise Athena!” for the Last Night of the Proms.
What do you do off the stage that provides inspiration on stage?
A. Surround myself with nature, listen to other people’s music, paint, and poetry.
Where do you derive happiness?
The process of writing. Performing. Being in nature. Relaxing with husband and friends.
