Alec said he didn’t want to echo the Chaconne too much, and I can’t think of any direct references. But the way the variations in the last movement develop is similar to how the Chaconne develops – for example, with all that bariolage (is that a word in English? – we use it in French) across the strings.

  You delivered your words very late that year, so Alec began composing the solo violin stuff quite early. I remember him coming to the Queen Elizabeth Hall, as the Royal Festival Hall was being refurbished, and our finding a dressing room at the back to talk things through between one of my rehearsals and a concert. We spent more than an hour discussing the music and I made various suggestions; but by then, of course, the piece was already quite advanced.

  VS: Is there anything you’re not quite happy with?

  PH: I’m not too sure about the use of the mute in the first movement, now that I’ve listened to it on the recording for radio. In the crescendo, the mute prevents it from going beyond a certain volume of sound. But that’s just an opinion.*

  VS: Coming to the third year and The Traveller …

  PH: Well, in the third year, Alec took a huge amount on and I felt he short-changed the violin. You gave him too many words, Vikram – and of course the words had to be sung and there was only so much space for the violin.

  VS: Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t actually give him the words: I selected some texts and told him to cull them. But he greedily grabbed them all.

  PH: Do you know, if there’s one tune that I remember straightaway when I think of the project, it would be that theme in the solo violin meditation in year three, which appeared again in the violin suite in year four. Strange to think that it almost didn’t exist. In fact, in Salisbury it didn’t – when the work was premièred and reviewed.

  VS: If it hadn’t existed it would have been a tragedy. The reviewer in The Times, who came to the Salisbury performance, and who praised your playing of the Ysaÿe solo violin sonata – ‘dispatched with fire and pluck’ (nice pun there) – mentioned that he was disappointed that in the new work, you, as the supposed ‘traveller’, didn’t have much to do on your own.

  PH: I actually think that review made Alec decide to write something specifically for the violin – and, though he was very busy, compose it in time for Chelsea. I think he felt bad – but then went on to create something wonderful. [Philippe pauses, then goes on:] You know, I think, with Alec – though he has written a string quartet now, and instrumental works, and that nocturne for harp and violin that Alison and I played – writing for the violin doesn’t come naturally to him, and I don’t think that that’s what he wants to do first. He’s very much in the voice and choral tradition. That’s where he’s at his most comfortable and of course singers love what he writes for them. And librettists too, I suppose, because the words are set so clearly. But it’s a shame that he doesn’t write more for strings because I think it would be fantastic. When he puts his mind to it, it really works. That Meditation was perfect. For me, of course, it was a great relief that I could say something individually for once instead of just being part of a big noise. And maybe the adrenalin brought about by the stress of its newness helped my playing! But it was also very good for the balance of the piece itself to have that reflection without words.

  When he got around to writing it and sent me the score, I read it on my own at first. I then went to rehearse it with him; this was just two days before the Chelsea Festival. ‘Oh God, why did you put me so high up there on the E string?’ I asked him. He said – and this is typical of Alec, who composes for the sound of particular performers – ‘Because when you play up there I find it beautiful and I wanted to use it.’ Unfortunately I had – and still have – a wolf note on my violin that affects all the Cs and particularly the high ones. It was fine that year, but sometimes when I play that piece it drives me crazy. I know they say that only good violins have wolf notes, but …

  VS: I can’t understand how wolf notes can drive you crazy, Philippe, when you didn’t seem to be distracted by the G-sharp hum from the fused fluorescent lighting in Salisbury Cathedral when you played the solo Ysaÿe.

  PH: Hmm. Actually, it was very distracting before I began playing; but you just get on with it. Between movements it was a bit disturbing. But I love the Ysaÿe, and it was great to play it in that space, with some distance and resonance.

  VS: In the fourth year you got plenty to do – with that violin and piano suite.

  PH: Yes! But we had to fight for it. Alec wanted to write it for violin and guitar.

  VS: I don’t think Alec is in love with the piano. He thinks it a bit of a bully.

  PH: Well, he writes well for it – in his own idiom – with an open texture. You know, it may be great to write for unusual combinations of instruments, but if you write for normal forces, like violin and piano, your pieces are much more likely to be repeated and heard. I really longed for something that I would be able to continue to play after the whole project was over.

  VS: So we bullied poor Alec when he brought up the question of the guitar. I remember making it clear on the patio that day that I wasn’t having it. My muse would go on strike.

  PH: Perhaps there was a bit less novelty in the violin and piano piece of the fourth year than in the solo violin suite of the second year. But that was right in a way: themes from earlier years were brought in to weave things together, to give a sense of closure. The Meditation theme came in. So did the Dies Irae semiquavers and double-stops from the Ysaÿe. It gave me a lot of pleasure when I came to play it. In general, in an instrumental work by Alec, things always look a bit bare and almost unfinished on paper. There’s no articulation, hardly any dynamic instructions – even less than in Bach! – not too many tempi indications either, and he writes in normal notation without the usual twenty-first-century markings. It looks easy but it’s very deceptive. You have to explore it and understand it yourself. The moment I start to work on it, I begin to find things. The piece starts taking shape and grows richer and richer musically and emotionally, and this process never really stops.

  A few weeks after I talked to Philippe, in the course of a conversation with Alec, I brought up the question of the violin. Had he ever played it?

  AR: Not since I was at school and people begged me to stop. I tried the cello too, but not for long.

  VS: So how do you write for strings? Especially something like the suite for unaccompanied violin that you produced in the second year?

  AR: It’s the same as when I compose for guitar – or any other instrument I don’t play. The process goes something like this: I write a few sketches; then I take them to the performer, and we start playing around with them – and that’s how I start learning about the instrument and what works well with it and what doesn’t. The advantage of this initial ignorance is that you sometimes come across something that is quite original in conception, but which doesn’t fall under the well-worn path of the fingers – doesn’t sit, so to speak, and in some cases is physically impossible to play. When something like this happened, Philippe would say, ‘I can’t do it exactly like that but I could do it like this or like this,’ and we found a way of adapting it to make it work. That was really satisfying for both of us because his ideas got into it. And over the four years, I’ve got better at writing for the violin and for strings in general.

  Or else the inspiration might come more directly from hearing something he did. I remember asking him in a sort of workshop session to play the open strings bowed. The sonority he produced made a huge impression on me, and I began looking at the effect of an open string being played as a pulsed drone while the string below it or above it was being played melodically; and then moving up from one string to another in the same manner. I use that idea for the first movement of Ponticelli, the suite for solo violin. It’s not like anything I’ve ever written before and I still think it’s the best of the movements.

  VS: I like the last movement best myself – it’s got tremendous energy and compulsiveness.

  AR [laughing]: Philippe was always looking for a challenge. So that’s where I thought I’d keep him quiet with technical matters – but I was astonished by what he did. That last movement was full of all sorts of shenanigans: left-hand pizzicato as well as lots of right-hand pizz, multinote chords, harmonics, the lot. And he played it as if all that was no problem at all – and got to the heart of the music, to the dance of it.

  VS: For me – and for Philippe too – one of the most beautiful moments of all was the Meditation by the violin towards the end of The Traveller. Which, of course, almost didn’t get written.

  AR [looking slightly guilty]: Er, yes, it wasn’t there in the first performance, in Salisbury. Let me explain. I was writing the music in a very artificial order that year, not at all in the sequence of the libretto itself. I had to do all the children’s choruses first – they needed a very long rehearsal time since they sang from memory. I gave them their parts just after Christmas, I think. Second, all the chorus work: the amateurs had to start learning it in the spring. Then, the solo voice for Mark Padmore. The orchestra next: a month before the première. Apart from this, there was the physical effort of producing all those parts. So with regard to the violin I rather lost my way. I saw the violin as ‘the traveller’, but the voices tended to dominate it whenever they appeared together because, well, they had the words. It was only after hearing the first performance that I realized that something was missing: a passage without words, an extended instrumental meditation, a fantasia for solo violin at the end of the last section. I thought, ‘How on earth will I write it? It’s just two weeks before Chelsea.’ But as soon as I sat down, it came; and Philippe did his usual job of looking at it and playing it immediately and making it sound beautiful.

  VS: To excuse you further, weren’t you also burdened with conducting that year?

  AR: Well, I had to be closely involved in the rehearsals anyway because of the intergenerational chorus – with ages ranging from eight to eighty! I had to be sure that everything was singable. The children were great – they sounded like real children, not choristers. And it was wonderful the way the communities got involved. In fact, in the case of Lichfield, they used the performance to establish a Festival Chorus, something they hadn’t had before. But the reason why I did the actual conducting – ‘burdened’ isn’t how I’d put it; it was a pleasure too – was so that the festivals could afford four or five extra musicians for the orchestra. There were money problems that year because of the expense of an orchestra – and although the choruses were amateur, there were quite a lot of choir trainers and accompanists – and of course travel and administration costs. Even with regard to the use of Salisbury Cathedral, we kept wondering: could we manage it or couldn’t we? But we had to assume we could; there was no other way to proceed, really.

  VS: Since you’ve touched upon money and festivals, I should say that things for the most part ran smoothly on that front, even if there were some constraints and uncertainties. But the picture would not be complete if I didn’t mention one unfortunate exception. The Chelsea Festival wound itself up at the end of year three, and a different organization called the Chelsea Arts Festival took its place. It was only with the greatest of persistence that Philippe received anything at all from them for that fourth year; they still owe him and the pianist more than half their fee. First they claimed that they hadn’t received their invoices; then they claimed that they simply didn’t have the money. It is painful to see musicians, who aren’t rich by any means, being taken advantage of in this way. But, as Philippe says, when he thinks of the project, it is your music rather than this sorry business, isolated as it was, that comes overwhelmingly to mind.

  AR: Well, that’s one instance, involuntary in this case, of artists having to subsidize their own art. But the project did also benefit from the generosity of a great many people – such as friends of the festivals. And when the three-year guarantee of the funding agencies ran out, it was an anonymous donor who provided the commission fee for the fourth year.

  VS: Continuing with the subject of festivals but moving from money matters to logistics, did you find having three performances in different places and on different dates a problem?

  AR: In terms of logistics, perhaps – for example, finding dates when all the musicians were available – not just for the concerts, for the rehearsals as well. But in fact it was wonderful to have three performances. It made all the difference to the work. It’s true, I could only compose with one venue in mind, and the other two festivals had to find something similar; but that wasn’t a serious disadvantage. What was a huge advantage was the chance I got to listen to the music as it was actually being performed and to make changes for the next concert – sometimes just a bit of tweaking, but at other times, as with the violin meditation, a major change. And the performers became more comfortable with the music when they’d played it a couple of times. So by the time the third concert came around, it would still sound fresh, but you could tell they felt at home with it. In a way it’s a pity that it’s the first performance that gets reviewed! But at least the recording for radio was always done at the third performance, which of course was more polished; and besides, Lichfield Cathedral, particularly the Lady Chapel, has a very good acoustic.

  VS: How did your works turn out to be so long – so much longer than the festivals had commissioned?

  AR: I got carried away – and they didn’t rein me in. Actually, the precedent was set by the first year; once that had turned out all right with the listeners and critics, the festivals weren’t too concerned about limiting the length of the works in subsequent years.

  VS: Well, why was the first year so long then?

  AR: If you’d written me a short libretto, Vikram, twenty minutes’ worth, so to speak, that’s all I’d have written. But because you weren’t given the time to write anything, I had to forage around for something from your work to inspire me. I chose your translations of Du Fu’s poems, which turned out to be forty minutes long. So by writing nothing, you doubled the length of my work.

  VS: Considering the length of your pieces, there was clearly no room for anything else in the second half of the concerts in which they were played. But what about the rest of the programming – the first half? From our point of view the new piece may have been at the centre of things, but for most of the audience, they were going to a concert which consisted of other things besides.

  AR: The programming of a concert is very important – and I admit that in the first year, the first half was a bit ad hoc. Songs in Time of War had tenor, violin, guitar and harp – and there wasn’t a lot we could choose from with those instruments. We had the Saint-Saëns Fantaisie for violin and harp, and Piazzolla’s Café 1930 for violin and guitar. And Mark Padmore sang Vaughan Williams’s Ten Blake Songs with Gareth Hulse on oboe – though I hadn’t used the oboe in my work. At one point, I did think of taking advantage of Gareth by having a few plaintive oboe notes sound offstage at the very end of my piece to represent the ghosts of the dead soldiers in the ‘Ballad of the Army Carts’. But in the event, I didn’t.

  VS: The second year wasn’t ad hoc in the least: all Bach and very symmetrical: a motet for double choir – Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, the Chaconne from the second partita for solo violin, another motet for double choir – Komm, Jesu, komm.

  AR: I think it was the most successful year as far as programming went. Shared Ground and Ponticelli were basically inspired by Bach’s motets and solo violin music. I really steeped myself in those works that year – I had never written for unaccompanied choir or solo violin before – and I can see a few direct influences here and there. For example, the repeated ‘Komm’ in Komm, Jesu, komm was reflected in my repeated setting of the word ‘This’ in the last of your poems. And the programme order of the first half established the interlocking of choir and solo violin which we further developed in the Shared Ground/Ponticelli sequence.

  VS: The third year, when The Traveller was performed, the Britten Sinfonia played Britten’s arrangement of the Purcell Chacony in G. And Mark Padmore sang Finzi’s Dies Natalis with them. But the programming that year caused quite a few problems for Philippe, I remember. He had planned a Bach concerto, but because the festivals couldn’t afford the expense a harpsichord would entail, that had to be dropped. Also, Richard Hawley at Lichfield, in retrospect quite rightly, though it was quite frustrating at the time, insisted on ‘programming that made sense’. Philippe told me that he went back to thinking about solo Bach, then solo Bartók, and finally hit upon Ysaÿe, which was an inspired choice: the second solo violin sonata, with its Dies Irae theme in each movement. And that of course made perfect programming sense – Dies Natalis, the presence of the Dies Irae, and the stages of life and death in The Traveller.

  AR: Which actually had an effect on my own music in the fourth year, when I incorporated the Dies Irae theme in the Seven Elements Suite for violin and piano.

  VS: Coming to the fourth year then, apart from the Seven Elements Suite, you also wrote the Seven Elements song-cycle for tenor and piano and The Hermit on the Ice for all three. And the all-Schubert first half paralleled this: various songs with some link to each of the seven elements, then the A Major Violin Sonata and finally The Shepherd on the Rock in your arrangement for tenor, piano and violin (instead of Schubert’s original clarinet).

  AR: I learned a lot from doing that arrangement; it’s quite a long piece. Getting it into James Gilchrist’s range, preventing things from going off the lower range of the violin, and so on – I didn’t adapt a lot, but there was a bit of fiddling and fudging, which I hope Schubert wasn’t too worried about. The two halves of that programme influenced each other. The very idea for your poem ‘The Hermit on the Ice’ came from the title of Schubert’s piece. And when I was setting the last two lines of your poem – ‘The blue earth with its iron core / Spins on through time, spins on through space’ – I decided to quote Schubert’s lovely floating melody to the words ‘und singen … und singen’ in my violin and piano parts, as I imagined the earth singing Schubert as it spins away into the distance.