Premiere Award Fenella Humphreys
Caprices
Works by Tom Coult, Oliver Leith, Freya Waley-cohen, Laurence Osborn et al Fenella Humphreys (violin) Rubicon RCD 1074
Five years ago, Fenella Humphreys won the BBC Music Magazine Instrumental Award with Bach2 The Future: Vol. 2, an album of works for violin alone. Now she’s repeated the trick, this time in the Premiere category with Caprices, featuring works ranging from Paganini to the present day – again, all for solo violin. Which begs the question: does she simply not like playing with other people?
‘There’s actually something very enjoyable about recording on my own!’ she replies. ‘That’s largely because it allows me to have an absolute focus. And of course I am working in partnership with the producer, so it’s not just me. That said, they are very hard work for both the performer and the producer, as you hear every single sound I make on the fingerboard because it is so closely miked.’
Some albums are planned to the last detail from the outset. Others develop more organically. Humphreys explains that Caprices falls into the latter category, the initial spark being Tom Coult’s Four Etudes, which then led to her dipping into the distant and recent past for further works, commissioning new music from Laurence Osborn and Oliver Leith and, fuelled by a couple of beers after a concert, asking Freya Waley-cohen if she would arrange her recorder piece Caffeine for the violin. Then, to round it all off, she persuaded 12 different composers each to write her a variation on Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. ‘As far as I know, none of the composers got in touch with each other, yet none of the variations sound like each other,’ she says. ‘That is a real testament to the variety of musical language we’ve got out there.’
‘It’s a real testament to the variety of music we’ve got out there’