Nicola LeFanu (b. 1947)

[Serial_Apologist]

Donald MacLeod talks to Nicola LeFanu in the year of her 70th birthday, with the composer looking back at her life and career and talking about those who influenced her music.

If civilisation is not progressing it goes into reverse, as much a principle in music and the arts as it is in politics and economics, is there for all to experience in today's globalised capitalist world. Nicola is one of the dwindling number who have kept faith with the post-Schoenbergian modernist inheritance of Humphrey Searle, Elizabeth Lutyens in this country. Her mum was Elisabeth Maconchy.

[Beef Oven!]

Donald MacLeod talks to Nicola LeFanu in the year of her 70th birthday, with the composer looking back at her life and career and talking about those who influenced her music.

If civilisation is not progressing it goes into reverse, as much a principle in music and the arts as it is in politics and economics, is there for all to experience in today's globalised capitalist world. Nicola is one of the dwindling number who have kept faith with the post-Schoenbergian modernist inheritance of Humphrey Searle, Elizabeth Lutyens in this country. Her mum was Elisabeth Maconchy.

Heard the name, but haven’t heard any of her music. From your description, I think she would be of great interest to me.

[Serial_Apologist]

"Head and heart is one thing for me" - Nicola replying to MacLeod' asking her about the question of balance between intellect and emotion in her inspiration - an answer I'm pretty sure ferneyhoughgeliebte would heartily agree with.

Ms Lefanu comes across as approachable, indeed thoroughly likeable - the kind of person one would like to spend hours in conversation with. I happen to like her music very much - once past her, for me, questionable, but infrequent uses of microtones, it contains very few awkwardnesses, and has that haunting endrizzled landscape quality that arguably marks the best of British music. One wonders to what extent the forum's preoccupation with early music, the classics and Bruckner reflect a comparative neglect for the modern British composers of a certain generation among the music loving population as a whole, which in turn reflects broadcasters' and concert promoters' preferences for newer musics that make a more immediate or obvious impact but lack the in-depth qualities required to invite meaningful discussion.

[HighlandDougie]

I very much liked 'The Crimson Bird', when I heard its first performance at the Barbican a couple of months ago (Rachel Nicholls/BBC SO/Ilan Volkov). A very powerful text (from John Fuller's 'Siege'), underpinned by some really imaginative orchestration. It made a strong impression on me (I'm a big fan of, inter alia, Elizabeth Lutyens and Elisabeth Maconchy, as well as Michael Tippett so I suppose it fell on already-receptive ears). As it was recorded by the BBC, I'm sorry that it doesn't seem to have featured in CoTW but hope that it is performed again soon, although the Barbican acoustic probably didn't do the very large orchestra any favours. The composer was much in evidence afterwards in the bar area and seemed - rightly - to be very happy with the performance and the enthusiastic reception from the audience.

[Serial_Apologist]

I would have expected Nicola LeFanu to have attracted more comment on the forum.

[Tony Halstead]

I would have expected Nicola LeFanu to have attracted more comment on the forum.

I have a lovely memory of playing, about 30 years ago, in a BBC recording of Nicola's wonderful song 'Rondeaux' for tenor and horn.
The tenor, who sang superbly, was the sadly much-missed Philip Langridge.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I would have expected Nicola LeFanu to have attracted more comment on the forum.

Yes - as I was away with limited computer access last week, I was planning to contribute when I got back home. I greatly enjoyed hearing these programmes - LeFanu is a composer I've known about since I bought the Unicorn-Kanchana cassette in around 1984; I also have the NAXOS CD of a selection of her works performed by the Goldberg Ensemble. I had never before been so impressed by the works as I was hearing them last week: an extraordinarily gifted craftswoman, with real imagination (though I still don't like the sounds Nicolas Clapton makes in Cancion de la Luna). (It was an exact mirror image reaction to that which I'd had the last time I was in the same part of the country last October, when Oliver Knussen was CotW : I had thought that I quite liked his Music until then - but heard in extended and close proximity, I became increasingly unimpressed by it.) I found LeFanu's Music engaging and impressive - much fresher, in fact than the works presented in the Nash Ensemble's programme broadcast last Saturday night - and the equipoise of intellectual passion was quite wonderful.

I was interested to hear her describe how she avoided teachers (such as Goehr) because she wanted to discover her own way of working, and not be told that this was the "wrong" way of doing so - I think I had this somewhere in mind when I posted my comments on Alison's "Form" Thread. Ironically, I was much more impressed by the piece by her own teacher, Jeremy Dale Roberts (broadcast on the Monday programme) than with the solo violin piece by her own "pupil", Sadie Harrison - and if I have a reservation about LeFanu's work it is in the way that it ignores other strands of Musical possibilities that have been so successfully explored by her contemporaries (she is the same age as Sciarrino); not so much "keeping faith with the post-Schoenbergian modernist inheritance", as closing out other avenues to which that inheritance has also led.

Basta! These concerns perhaps* affect her teaching more than her own creative work, which I found rich and generous and want to hear again.


* - "perhaps" in that, whilst she is clearly an encouraging and inspirational teacher, that very sense of security might lead a composer to feel that these other ways of Musical thinking "don't matter" - which is the impression I took away from the Harrison piece. I shall be delighted to be proven wrong by several examples of her students who are producing creative work in very different ways.

[Dave2002]

I would have expected Nicola LeFanu to have attracted more comment on the forum.

I did quite like her string quartet, and the other day I downloaded some of her works in order to use up some of my e-music credit. Not listened to them yet.

[Richard Barrett]

whilst she is clearly an encouraging and inspirational teacher

As it happens I had a couple of lessons with her in 1981 or so, when I signed up to do a part-time MMus at King's College where both she and David Lumsdaine were teaching at the time. (I lasted less than three months before dropping out.) Encouraging: yes. Inspirational: well, her interest in contemporary music seemed rather narrowly based to me, as you say. I'm not sure she had much idea of what I was talking about. What I've heard of her music seems a bit noncommittal.