Violinist and winner of the 2018 BBC Music Magazine Award Fenella Humphreys presents a new collaboration with Oxford historian Leah Broad which explores ‘lost voices’ through violin music. Based around Broad’s debut book Quartet (March 2023), this concert explores the work of four British female composers. Ethel Smyth, Doreen Carwithen, Rebecca Clarke, and Dorothy Howell composed some of the century’s most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten – until now. Lost Voices breathes new life into the music and stories of these women, intertwining Broad’s narrative with performances of their music by Humphreys and pianist Nicola Eimer.
Fenella Humphreys employs her customary imaginative flair and luminous palette of tone colours to tease the beauty out of a set of pieces that are compact in scale but not in ambition…Humphreys and Eimer at their stellar best…