Purposeful Listening 10

Surprise/platform

On Sunday I was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Vikingur Ólafsson and the Philharmonia’s celebration of Kurtág at 100, conducted by Elena Schwarz. It was a programme similar to, though pointedly different from, the one Ólafsson gave in Budapest two weeks ago, on Kurtág’s birthday itself, with the composer in attendance. That concert has been written up by Paul Griffiths, who has also published a second report from the Budapest festivities. In fact, the London performance went through several last-minute changes – reasons for which became clear in the concert itself. Enough changes, in fact, that the notes I had originally been asked to write fell by the wayside. Tom Service and Ólafsson himself presented from the stage instead; a better result all round, as the pianist’s personal relationship to several of the pieces was something only he could have conveyed.

It’s not often you can say of a concert that the encore was the best bit – and what had gone before was exceptional. Ólafsson had begun the evening at a muted upright piano, sat to the right of his wife, Halla Oddný Magnúsdóttir, in the same configuration as that adopted by György and Martá Kurtág in their legendary Játékok recitals (the last of which, Service told us – and which I hadn’t realised – had taken place on this same stage in December 2013, as part of the Southbank’s year-long The Rest Is Noise festival). The pair played ‘Twittering’, one of a handful of four-hand pieces in the first volume of Játékok, and ‘Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit’, one of Kurtág’s favourite Bach arrangements. Magnúsdóttir then took a seat in the front row and Ólafsson switched to the Steinway at the centre of the stage for a run of more Játékok, plus pieces of additional significance to him and Kurtág: an arrangement made by him for Kurtág of the Air on a G String (which utilised Kurtág’s own practice of registral displacement to clarify the lines), and an arrangement given to him by Kurtág of the Adagio movement from Haydn’s String Quartet in G major, op. 76, no. 1, apparently a favourite of Martá’s and the only thing guaranteed to make her smile in her final days. Homages by Kurtág to Bach, Schumann to Bach, Kurtág to Schumann and Mark Simpson to Kurtág marked this less as a concert than a ceremony of gifts. And after a delightfully translucent Webern Passacaglia (more early modernist than late Romantic, as it is often styled), a precious realisation of the … quasi una fantasia …, Op. 27, no. 1, instrumental groups around and among us.

Allusions to Kurtág’s life and loves, and to the relationship enjoyed between him and Ólafsson over the last decade, abounded. And so with his encores, Ólafsson played two pieces that he had played to Kurtág at their first meeting: a folksong from Iceland and another from Hungary, the latter arranged by Bartók. Now at rest, the musicians on stage – with Service and Schwarz taking a seat among them – watched and listened with us. Those around the auditorium stood where they were, as though held in thrall by virtuoso street performer. These were the gifts Ólafsson had offered to Kurtág: a song from his own country, and an interpretation of one from Kurtág’s. In a circle around him, we sat rapt, as if at that first meeting ourselves.

This week I have had the huge pleasure of interviewing the soprano and curator Juliet Fraser. To anyone involved in new music, Juliet needs no introduction – an extraordinary singer, a true champion of composers, a storied collaborator. But she is also a mover behind the scenes, one of those admirable people who see a thing that needs to be done and gets on and does it. The record label all that dust that she founded in 2018 with Mark Knoop and Newton Armstrong is an unfailing source of gorgeous boutique recordings – ranging from Nono and Babbitt to Catherine Lamb and Aaron Einbond. And later this month sees the return of the annual eavesdropping festival that she founded and now runs with producer Linda Jankowska, as well as small team of additional producers and designers. (She also writes a Substack, Notes on flying.)

eavesdropping is, in my experience at least, unique. Its almost exclusive (but not rigid) emphasis on female, non-binary and transgender artists is part of that, but actually not the most significant part. What is even more meaningful, I think, is how every other aspect of the festival flows out from that initial axiom: its structure, its emphasis on informality and experiment (without losing sight of rigour or critique), its openness of ears, minds and arms. When I reviewed the 2024 festival for The Wire, I wrote that ‘Many festivals claim to be accessible or welcoming to all; few practice that ambition quite so assiduously.’ Like much of Juliet’s practice, eavesdropping is a shining example of that old writers’ maxim: ‘show, don’t tell’.

eavesdropping this year runs from 19–22 March, at Cafe Oto and the Vortex in Dalston. Full details can be seen here. Juliet also produces a podcast series of conversations with the festival’s artists, which can be accessed on Soundcloud here, or wherever you get your podcasts. It is a brilliant and always insightful listen.

My conversation with Juliet took place over Zoom earlier this week, and has been edited in all the usual ways.

Interview with Juliet Fraser

Juliet Fraser. Photo by Dimitri Djuric

TRJ: I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to start by stealing a question that you use on all your podcasts, which is: how do you describe yourself as an artist?

Juliet Fraser: I suppose it’s a bit context-dependent. Either I’m a singer, or I’m a soprano, or occasionally I’m a vocalist. And sometimes I’m a curator ... I guess I’m a singer. If I’m talking to a taxi driver, then I’m a singer, I’m definitely not a soprano.

TRJ: What’s the difference?

JF: Well, I feel like ‘soprano’ is a really classical identifier. And it tends to lead people immediately towards opera, interestingly. Whereas a vocalist is – that’s probably the term that I use the least – but that’s definitely less classical. And singer, of course, is the broadest thing. So it normally invites a follow-up question.

TRJ: ‘Are you like Taylor Swift?’

JF: Exactly. And I say yes, just like Taylor.

TRJ: When people ask me what I write about, I say, well, you might have heard of Philip Glass; everything beyond that is my area … and then they often lose interest.

JF: That’s really interesting. How did you alight on Philip Glass as a reference?

TRJ: Because he’s well known. He feels like someone people might have heard of. They might know the film scores.

JF: Normally it goes: ‘I’m a singer.’ ‘What sort of singer?’ ‘I’m a classical singer.’ ‘Oh, so you do opera?’ ‘No, actually, I do everything except for opera.’ ‘Oh, right, so what is that then?’

And then I quite often end up saying, ‘Do you know the Turner Prize for visual arts? Well, it’s a bit like that, but with music.’ I’m doing the edgy experimental, weird side of music.

TRJ: It’s so weird that there isn’t a common reference point for people – we always have to come at it sideways via something else.

JF: But maybe that’s the nature of experimentalism, that’s it’s a bit tricky to categorise.

TRJ: I wanted to really to talk to you about the curation side of your work. When you did start curating, in addition to performing?

JF: 2017. I suppose it depends a bit what you mean by curation, because every time you design a programme for a concert that is curation. But I think what we’re talking about today is me curating other artists, and that began with eavesdropping in 2017.

TRJ: What was the initial impulse?

JF: The initial impulse was really a space. I’d moved to East London about five years before, and I knew that I couldn’t practise in this flat where I’m sitting today. So I was looking around at spaces in East London that I might be able to hire to do my practice in. And I had been working in this wooden chapel in Bethnal Green, which was not open to the public because it had a leaking roof, but that wasn’t a problem for me.

And at some point – I think I must have been showing it to somebody else – I just thought, there should be more happening in here than just me doing my practice. So it was really the space that made me think, what would it be like to present an event here? And then what would that event look like? What would I want to do? I could do anything, so what would I want to do?

TRJ: As it has developed, eavesdropping has gained quite a strong identity, and maybe a kind of philosophy behind it. We can get into what that is, but when did it start to emerge?

JF: I think it’s been there right from the beginning. I don’t really think that it has changed, in fact. I remember standing in the space and thinking, who do I want to present here? What sort of event is worth the enormous effort? I was thinking about this recently, but I think I just had this idea: What would it be if I made it a platform for female musicians?

There was a lot of talk about Keychange¹ in the years before that, and I guess I had maybe been a little bit sceptical about the 50/50 idea [of gender parity in concert programming] – this is not a new conversation for us to be having, but some of the issues that arise with the idea of 50/50 programming. And I think once I’d had this idea – what would it be if I made a platform for women – I then thought, well, why not? Let’s just see what the implications of that are.

And I since I wanted it to be a platform for women making experimental music at the edges of various genres, I felt particularly aware that sometimes it was even harder for women working in that way. I feel like we’re expected to stay in the mainstream – you know, this idea of lanes. So it just felt at that moment that it might be a worthwhile experiment. And that’s always how I’ve seen it, really: an experiment with an idea. I’ve held to that, but I’ve also never felt that I have to hold to that in perpetuity – there may come a time when I want to loosen that or change the emphasis a bit. And it’s important that I feel free to do that.

TRJ: The format is quite unusual, isn’t it? Because it tends to be two sets each evening, each one a solo performer or maybe a duo; but it’s not ensembles coming in. One of the things I find really interesting about eavesdropping is how much – not just who’s on stage but also the things around the festival, the ethos, the audience – all seem to stem from this idea of it being a platform for female, non-binary and transgender musicians. And it just feeling like a very different space as a consequence. Is the solo performer focus a part of that?

JF: Yeah, I think so. That’s partly practical: it’s to do with budgets. But even more than budgets, it was to do with the size of the space in which eavesdropping began, which had an audience capacity of maybe forty-five. And it was a very beautifully resonant space; I’d tried singing in there with, say, five voices, and it was just too loud!

I also thought, there are many people for whom that act of stepping up there alone is quite a significant part of their artistic development. And that turned out to be true; it turned out that there was a need for that. Over the years, we have had a few artists who one might consider very experienced in terms of group improvisation or ensemble performance, but creating a set of solo material is really nudging them into new territory.

TRJ: Lots of the artists come to eavesdropping with works in progress or something they’re trying. It feels like that openness is part of its identity.

JF: It is, and I think that comes from me being a performing artist myself. I decided very quickly that I didn’t want to be announcing repertoire, I didn’t want a performance to be locked into a programme – like one tends to be so many months in advance – because if it were a space to share new things, often you want the flexibility to go, ‘Okay, I thought that was going to be a good idea, but it doesn’t quite work, I’ve needed to tweak it’. Whether that’s because you decided you wanted to learn such and such a piano sonata and actually it turns out that you hate it! [laughs] I don’t want somebody to be obliged to follow through on something.

It’s what I describe as artist-led programming. It’s always me talking to the artist … It always begins with a conversation: ‘Hi, what are you working on? What’s your current kind of direction of travel? What’s interesting you at the moment?’ And then seeing if there’s some kind of overlap there with what I want to programme.

And then that conversation continues after they’ve been officially invited to be part of the festival. I’ll be talking to them about what they’re working on. They might be saying, I’m thinking about this or maybe that, and I’m saying, ‘Okay, I think maybe this one and not that one’ or whatever, depending on the other artists that evening – or partly on just what I want to hear.

So it is very much a conversation, but I try to let them make the final decision.

TRJ: Do you tend to know more or less what they’re going to do on the night, or are there occasions when it surprises you?

JF: Definitely occasions when it does surprise me. And that’s great, as far as I’m concerned. And often I’m programming people that I’ve never heard live, so there’s a significant proportion of the performance that I will not have heard live, and I love that. I love turning up to the festival and going, ‘Oh, I get to hear this at last!’

TRJ: How do you find people to programme?

JF: Lots of listening. Lots of rabbit holes. I think a lot of encountering names – if not the people themselves – when I’m wandering around the place doing festivals. I always look at the rest of a festival billing and come away with a little shortlist of people who I then want to go and research. Some recommendations. All sorts of sorts of ways, really.

TRJ: Do you sometimes see someone in a group concert and think, well, I wonder what she would do on her own?

JF: Occasionally. And there are some people who I really keep a beady eye on for several years. There was somebody that I encountered in 2017, just before we launched – we were a series then, it was a series of four events before we moved to the festival model – and I just kept a watchful eye on their practice as it developed. And then finally I invited them to perform in the 2025 festival. So that was quite a long incubation period, but that’s representative. Not of everybody, but there are quite often one or two people like that.

TRJ: Is not just – it’s the start of the year, who do I book?

JF: Not at all. And sometimes it’s just about the stars aligning, whether they happen to be in Europe or whether I happen to remember them at that particular moment.

TRJ: When you’ve got four shows and eight performers, eight sets, are you also thinking about how they’re going to pair up on the night, and how the shape of the thing overall is going to be?

JF: Definitely the shape of the thing overall. I always see it as a jigsaw puzzle, and there are lots of different sorts of … I’m trying to think of a better word than diversity because that tends to mean quite a narrow thing, but I’m looking for as much breadth as possible. Across the programme.

It’s pretty easy for me to programme the contemporary classical people because that’s my world. So it may be that I’ve got two or three of those locked in quite early on, and then there’s this very complicated process of filling the rest of the slots and making sure that there’s enough difference across the eight artists. But I no longer really programme thinking about the pairing because that nearly always tends to be more practical, about availability. Sometimes there are people that I think would really work, and when the dates align then that’s super, but often I don’t have any control over that. So I’m increasingly relaxed about it.

TRJ: It’s more to do with the overall balance.

JF: Yeah, it is. And sometimes the balance across the years. I remember one year there was one sort of experimental folk artist and I thought, well, maybe next year I don’t need to tick that box so I can lean into a different sort of experimental area.

TRJ: And then, the forum has emerged alongside the performances, but that’s relatively recent, I think?

JF: It’s been there from the beginning. It was called a symposium in the first year, and we’ve always wrestled with the language of it because, well, we were a series and a symposium – they both begin with S, isn’t that tidy? But ‘symposium’ felt like it might have been too academic and putting some people off. So then at some point we switched to a festival and a forum.

But we had a two-day symposium in the very first year. So that’s been part of the festival – or part of the activity, let’s say – right from the beginning.

TRJ: And how do you see the two things mutually interacting with one another?

JF: I guess I’ve always seen it as a meeting point between the visiting artists and the, let’s call them local artists. I was just aware that a lot of artists really are wrestling with questions. They’re not just people who get up to perform music, they are people who are thinking about some of the gnarly questions behind what it is to make music. So I thought it would be nice to create a space to actually do that work of asking questions together.

TRJ: And the theme of this year is risk-taking – ‘Cultivating courage’. I don’t know whether you would use this sort of language yourself, but there is a feminist underpinning to a lot of what eavesdropping does. Obviously from the programming choices, but also in the themes of the forums. How do you see those in terms of the wider underpinnings of the project?

JF: Firstly, to address the feminist thing, that has absolutely been there from the beginning. There were specific bits of feminist literature that were really shaping my thinking at the time when I decided to found eavesdropping. Where I’ve been less consistent, let’s say, is in the degree to which I want that word, ‘feminism’, to be at the front of how we describe the activity. Generally, I feel that I want the activity to speak for itself and the feminist thinking behind it just to be a sort of quiet underpinning.

TRJ: Yes.

JF: And then in terms of the themes, I feel like I’m doing that thing of sucking a finger and putting it in the air to feel where the breeze is coming from! [laughs] I’m trying to capture something a bit zeitgeisty, some of what feel like the pressing questions of the time. When it comes to pinning down the theme, it will often be that I’ve got two or three topics that I’m ruminating on, and I’m keeping an eye out to see what other festivals are doing. Generally sidestepping, for example, AI [as a theme], because that’s happening everywhere. It’s been on the shortlist for two or three seasons, but I just can’t bring myself to be another festival doing AI.

So it’s a little bit arbitrary, but I’m trying to read something that is in the air.

TRJ: Are you trying to line that theme up with the performers that you’ve got?

JF: Not really. There’s a bit of a wall, I would say, between the headline artist and the topic of the forum. But sometimes somebody clambers over the wall – which is happening this year because I’ve invited Zosha [Warpeha] to speak as part of the forum. So it’s quite flexible, but I don’t try to reflect the topic of the forum in the material of the festival evening.

TRJ: You mentioned that one of the early impulses was a response to the Keychange thing from whenever that was – ten years ago?

JF: I think it was 2012, even.

TRJ: A possibly depressing question, but do you think the conditions have changed since then? If you were to start something now, would you go in with a different set of questions, or not?

JF: I suppose there are two different questions in there. I think things have changed a little bit. People, artists, tell me both that it’s still very difficult and that things are a little better. I think it depends very much on what scene you’re in, actually. There are still scenes that are more or less misogynistic, I would say. Of course, there’s a great deal more awareness and talk about it, but whether that actually translates into a difference in terms of access is, well … just very variable, I would say.

And would I do it differently now? Yeah, I might do. But partly just because I’ve done it this way before, if you know what I mean. So I think that if I was starting a new festival, I probably would do it differently – but that’s mainly just to make it as fun as possible for me. I might not announce any particular strand to the programming and just let myself be a bit more playful.

That’s not to say that it’s hard work to do eavesdropping the way that I do. It really isn’t. There are just so many artists out there, and I’m nowhere near the bottom of my lists!

TRJ: It’s always remarkable to me when I see the programmes that there are always plenty of people who I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard of this person’. I like to think I’m reasonably in touch ... So that’s always good!

Speaking more broadly – not necessarily if you were to do something new – but are there things that you would still like to do with eavesdropping? Not necessarily particular artists, but more structural or conceptual things that you’d like to do with it?

JF: I’m never short of ideas. It’s really just money that makes the whole thing difficult.

TRJ: And what if money were no object?

JF: If money were no object ... I probably wouldn’t try to make much of a bigger festival. I like the model that we have. I guess I would feel that I had the capacity sometimes to move beyond the solo artists, or rather to support the particular individual artists that I was approaching. If they said to me, yes, I want to do that, but there’s this duo that I’ve just started … to be able to support slightly bigger groups on stage would also be really, really nice.

And then I would definitely do much more in terms of supporting touring. So bringing people to the festival and then facilitating them, having follow-on events or prior events in other places around the UK. That for sure is what I’d be doing. And maybe similarly with the forum – we’re experimenting with a one-day follow-on forum at Southampton University in May this year for the first time. Because I really like the intimacy of the scale of what we do currently, it makes a lot of sense to me to replicate things, but for similarly quite small audiences in other places.

TRJ: You already put performances up on YouTube. Would you be interested in releasing recordings of live sets?

JF: I mean, having run a record label, I know how much work that is – so probably not! [laughs] I’d be up for recording things at as high a quality as possible and then just giving them for free to the artists. That would be more my thing, for them to release it in the way that they want to release it.

I would definitely lean further into artist development. So creative retreats or residencies or whatever you want to call them – which we’ve done a couple of times, but that feels like a strand that could be so intrinsically linked to the festival performances of new work. I think there’s a real dearth of residency opportunities here in the UK. I’ve just come back from France, where I’ve had two residencies. Not in my name, but with other people, and there’s such a better infrastructure for R&D over there.

So that would be another thing. And one of my fantasies for next year is to work towards some sort of published compendium of the various talks and papers and whatnot that we’ve had over the years. That would very much be a whittled-down selection, but I think it would be really nice to have a physical documentation of the thought side of the festival.

TRJ: Yes, because that can be a bit more ephemeral in a weird way.

I was listening to your podcast with Nathalie Forget, in which this question of residencies came up. And I agree that there isn’t very much in the UK at all, whereas in France, Germany, Italy, it’s quite a healthy way of nurturing the system.

JF: Yeah, it’s really difficult to create new work here. Or at least I find it is. Obviously the improvisers have a totally different setup, but for people who are either commissioning or creating original devised work, having that time to experiment without the pressure of a performance at the end of it is really difficult to find here.

TRJ: Do you feel that gives you, through eavesdropping, a sense of mission?

JF: I feel so much sense of mission, Tim. Every year, I think this is what needs to happen. This is the hole, these are the gaps in the provision; it’s really clear what could be done. But I have found it almost impossible to get the long-term financial stability that makes that possible.

TRJ: I can appreciate that. I think there’s also a tendency in the UK, among

funding bodies and so on, to look at things and say, Well, there’s eavesdropping already, so we don’t need another one of those. We’ve got Huddersfield, we don’t really need any other big new music festivals.

JF: Yeah.

TRJ: And that puts a lot of weight on one thing. It doesn’t really allow for a culture to grow, it just becomes isolated things that tick that particular box.

JF: I think that’s right. I had a very interesting conversation with a lot of other programmers recently. I think sometimes we feel like we’re pitted against one another and it makes partnership quite difficult. We’re either pitted against one another because you have to be doing something distinctive and unique and all the rest of it. Or literally we feel like we’re competing for the same pots of money.

But there’s a real … I speak generally because there are isolated instances of people confronting this … but there’s a general sense that the dots on the landscape across the UK aren’t very joined up, and it’s quite difficult for small organisations to develop significant partnerships that would make so much sense in terms of economies of scale or shared resources, or actually supporting artists to tour new work.

TRJ: I know that on the European festival circuit there is a bit more of this connection – are you involved in any of that?

JF: A little bit, informally. I would say that there’s a handful of festival directors on the continent that I talk to about things that are going on. That hasn’t really translated into anything concrete yet, but one of the challenges is that because I focus on solo artists, a lot of the – I guess it’s by chance – but a lot of the festival directors I consider friends tend to be programming much bigger stuff than that.

There are definitely possibilities to be explored there. But again, it comes back to the same thing about having some kind of long-term financial stability. That is actually what underpins long-term creative possibility, because it’s very difficult to have conversations two seasons in advance if you don’t even know if you’re going to have the funding for next year. It makes long-term planning almost impossible. Really. And that’s a real challenge to developing strategic partnerships.

TRJ: I’m only seeing any of this as it plays out on the stage, as it were, but I feel one of the strengths of eavesdropping is its light-footedness. You don’t come to it thinking, this is a big festival piece that has taken five years put together. So that is a strength, and a thing to be celebrated. But as you say, behind the scenes, it is presumably quite frustrating to think, well, we can’t really schedule anything beyond that.

JF: This is exactly the kind of salty contradiction that characterises eavesdropping because, we – when I say we, I guess I’m talking about me and the board of trustees – we’ve really come to cherish the sort of fleet-of-footness that you’re talking about, and to want to protect that. So we’re chasing this Holy Grail of some sort of stability that allows creative long-term planning, but a stability that doesn’t lock us into something that feels inflexible, or prevents us from adapting to what I perceive to be the pressing needs of the time.

TRJ: Let me turn in a more positive direction ...

JF: I was thinking the same! I didn’t want to sound like I’m whingeing!

TRJ: What have been some of your best experiences with eavesdropping? What does it look like and sound like when it’s at its best?

JF: Surprising, and in the best way. I’m always looking for a little touch of surprise. For me – because I am also an audience member – and for the audience. I want that sense of the unexpected. I’ve got this image of people’s ears being gently tweaked in a direction that they weren’t quite expecting. So that can be from an individual performer, or it can be from the contrast or indeed resonance that can arise between the two performers in an evening.

It’s really all about listening. That’s why I do it. I do it because I want to hear stuff. Because I want to be in that sort of space where there is very focused and generous listening going on. And then it’s about community … Sometimes I’m not really sure what that means, but I know that we’ve had it when I get unsolicited feedback from artists that is articulating that there was a special vibe going on.

Yeah, I think it’s actually artist feedback that is the most precious to me. Every season, people are reinforcing this need for a platform where they are given the freedom to try things. And the need for a platform where they’re being supported rather than kind of demanded of.

TRJ: There’s a very nurturing quality ...

JF: That’s the idea. I don’t always get it right, of course; at the end of the day, we’re all people. But that is certainly the idea. And again, that just comes from what I want as a performing artist. Maybe that is a bit of the special ingredient: that it has been curated by somebody who spends most of their time up on stage, doing that.

TRJ: It’s something that you feel as an audience member in the room, too: that you are also being nurtured, and doing some of the nurturing as well.

JF: Oh, that’s amazing. I never really know if that comes across. Not that I’m aiming to communicate that, but you never really know how this thing that stews inside you, how it’s actually going to be.

TRJ: It does feel unique. The other thing that I’ve noticed is that at Café Oto, you more or less know who is going to be in the audience. But actually, when I last went, two years ago, the audience was quite different from a normal new music, Oto audience. How much do you know about that? Where have these people come from?

JF [laughs]: I don’t really know! I think what I’ve learned is that the audience is always different. It’s different from night to night within the festival, and it’s different from year to year across the festivals.

We definitely brought something of an audience from our original Bethnal Green home to Oto. So that was already changing the Oto demographic a little bit. And then there are people that haven’t been to Oto before, but they’re coming for one artist on the billing or, you know … So it’s always a bit mysterious and always a bit in flux, which I’m totally happy with.

TRJ: You still seem to get the numbers.

JF: So far we have! [laughs]

TRJ: One last question then, and it’s an obvious one: but what can we expect this year? And what are you especially excited about?

JF: I think always expect a little bit of the unexpected. That’s certainly my attitude. I always want people to come with curious ears rather than fixed ideas about what they’re going to hear.

There are so many artists. I’m always excited about all eight of them, but I’m particularly excited to hear Zosha live. I’ve been wearing out their previous album and they’ve got a new one which has just dropped. I’m really excited about that – and the Hardanger d’amore. I mean, what could possibly be better? That’s a sound world that I just want to live in for weeks and weeks!

I don’t really want to single out individuals from just eight. But similarly, Audrey [Chen] I’ve never heard perform – and this is a vocalist I have been listening to for years. Whenever I’m giving a seminar or working with composers or vocalists, I nearly always put a track by Audrey.

That’s so exciting to me to finally hear her perform live. One of the things that I love is that even if you know an artist’s recorded work quite well, you never really know how they’re going to be in performance; they’re two completely different media. The energy that you finally get to witness when you see somebody performing live in a room – it’s never what I imagine it to be. That’s another element of surprise that I’m always looking forward to.

1. Keychange is an international equality network and movement, supported by the EU. Through various activities, it seeks to achieve full gender equality in the music industry; most notable are its Pledge and Manifesto, both of which were launched in 2018 (the Manifesto was updated in 2024).