Clare Hammond on Tippett, Britten and Walton

Clare Hammond's new album brings together works for piano and orchestra by three twentieth century British composers, giving them the advocacy they deserve after receiving little attention for too long. I spoke to Clare about the album, the challenges of finding opportunities to present less well-known repertoire to audiences, and her passion for the universal power of music across gender, race, age and background.

Your wonderful Tippett, Britten and Walton album was released last Friday. What drew you to these three works, which don’t get a huge amount of exposure? 

The idea for the project came from the conductor, George Vass. He has known the Walton for many years, and he thought it would work well alongside the Tippett and Britten. I did a doctorate in 2013, and I looked at left-hand piano concertos, with a special focus on the Britten Diversions and the Ravel concerto for the left hand. I didn't know the Walton or the Tippett before he suggested them, but I'm delighted that he did because they're both superb works, and the Tippett is a masterpiece. It's been an enormous amount of work to pull it all together, but I'm proud that we've managed to do this because it's been an incredibly fulfilling project.

The Britten is very virtuosic. In some ways, it almost sounds more challenging than the Ravel. 

Well, both the Ravel and the Britten are extremely demanding. The Britten tends to use thinner textures, so you get single lines, whereas the Ravel concerto tries to give the impression that you're playing with two hands, so the textures are much thicker. It's quicker to learn the notes of the Britten because there are far fewer of them, but you have to be so precise because any little mistake shows. It's almost like playing Mozart in that respect, but when you play with one arm the stamina is off the scale compared to two-handed piano music, because you don't have a chance to rest at any point, and you have to really project in concerto playing anyway. 

The Tippett was recorded by Martino Tirimo with the composer conducting, but otherwise it's only been recorded by British pianists – including Steven Osborne’s recent album. Has the recording with Tippett been part of your preparation at all?

I've got seven prior recordings of the Tippett, six are on disc, and one is of Lang Lang with the LSO, which is on YouTube. I listened to all of those, and it was interesting to hear how different pianists and orchestras have responded to the challenges. The piano part itself is very demanding, but also in terms of the ensemble it's tricky, with complex textures. Just to hear the evolution in performance styles was fascinating and I learnt a great deal. 

Is it a challenge to get some of this other music in front of the public in the concert hall? 

There's always the pressure to ensure that you have good audiences for live performances, which is crucial. Last autumn, I supplemented well-known works with music by Chaminade, Hélène de Montgeroult, some Fauré, and then I try to include some contemporary music as well. That means that people are willing to come because there's something that they know they'll enjoy, but they're often exhilarated to have discovered some new music that excites them, or a composer they've not heard of. Most people have never heard of Hélène de Montgeroult, for example, yet her music is astonishing, both in its quality and in terms of how visionary the language was for its time. That's been quite a game changer for many people, and it's been a pleasure to introduce that to new audiences. 

I can imagine something like the Moonlight may attract people who traditionally wouldn't go to a classical concert, and then that journey through the less well-known repertoire could be the hook for somebody to start exploring more. 

That's the hope, and it underpins a lot of the work that I do in schools and prisons, to introduce new audiences to this music so they can see that it's for them as well. Regardless of whether the concert is in a concert hall, school or a prison, I always speak to give the audience some kind of context - what the composer was going through, what they were trying to express - and that often gives people a real hook and a way into the music. They understand that composers were real people like us, and not just semi-deities on pedestals. Classical music is such an incredibly rich and vibrant tradition, and I'm keen to bring that to as many people as possible.

How do you find your music making in schools chimes with young people and with where they find themselves in the current curriculum and its challenges? 

I've just set up a charity called the Gloucestershire Piano Trust, and we arrange concerts in primary schools in collaboration with Gloucestershire Music, the county's music hub. I'm performing to children from the ages of four to eleven, often in a whole-school setting, sometimes in smaller year groups. It's exciting to see the enthusiasm on the children's faces, and these concerts are designed very much to inspire students, and to hopefully lead to more sustained engagement with the services that Gloucestershire Music provides. It’s about meeting children at the beginning of their musical journey and trying to inspire them, whether they become performers, play for fun or enjoy being listeners and audience members.

Children don't get these opportunities in a lot of cases, so for them to be able to hear you playing, and talking to them about music, must be a real spark. 

Well, you do see that in the response to the concerts. The vitality that you get from a live performance is completely different from recorded; I think recordings are wonderful, but it's in live music where you get that shared experience and it's vital that we enable people to experience that. 

How does that work in prisons? Is it a rehabilitative thing? Is it quite similar in some ways, in that some of the prisoners just haven't had the opportunity? 

Yeah, we get a lot of people in prisons who haven't really engaged with classical music, who haven't heard any kind of live music before. The format of the concerts I give is very similar to the school concerts, so lots of short pieces with spoken introductions, but I tend to focus on difficulties composers might have had with mental health or where they faced obstacles in their lives, just to show that they are human beings, that what they went through we experience in different ways, and how that comes out in the music. I had one man in a prison who'd never heard classical music before, and didn't know anything about it. I played him one of the Brahms Op. 118 pieces, and he immediately understood what Brahms was attempting to convey, and he'd got the essence of the music and that was incredible to see. Again, if people can see live music up close, can see your fingers move and they've shared it in a group, it's a very special thing. 

Tearing down that ivory tower is such an important part of bringing people to what we do and to what we love. I notice on the Schloss vor Husum album from the 2024 festival, you play the Coleridge-Taylor version of Deep River and of course Tippett used African-American spirituals within A Child of Our Time. What drew you to the Coleridge-Taylor? 

We used to go to second-hand music shops, and my family weren't musical, but they'd buy up massive piles of just anything. I encountered Cécile Chaminade and Coleridge-Taylor through folios of individual pieces, and I can't remember what we had by Coleridge-Taylor but he's been on my radar, and then I started researching this a few years ago and came across the 24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59. It's fascinating because we're used to this tradition of classical music being inspired by folk around this time through the music of Brahms, Dvorak and Vaughan Williams a bit later on, but with Coleridge-Taylor coming and taking African or African-American folk music and using it as such a fertile source of really very deep emotional inspiration, I thought that was really exciting. It opens up this slightly blinkered view that we that we often have of how music develops, and raises awareness of the cross-fertilization between different cultures and different countries.

The next thing you've got coming out is the Grace Williams, on Lyrita.

Yes, the Grace Williams which we did with BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Jac Van Steen. That was really exciting. It's another great piece that deserves to be more widely played. It was a sort of half concert, half studio recording and it was a while ago. It's been a long time coming through the pipeline that one. There are so many different moving parts, particularly with orchestral recordings. 

You must encounter, across your work, a myriad range of pianos of all sorts of shapes, sizes, states, conditions. How do you manage your relationship with the instrument itself? How important is it to you? 

I love the incredibly rare opportunities where you've got a beautiful piano and a technician to hand. In December I'm recording for BIS at Milton Court in the Barbican, and we've got three days in the studio. I've got a superb piano technician on hand, JP Williams, just one of the best, and that's a dream because we'll be able to record a with flexibility, purity and range of tone that's just not possible in most situations.  In concert I have a massive range of instruments; with a school and prison concert there's a range of exhausted uprights, and I've bought an electric piano that I take around prisons so at least I know what I'm going in with. When you're performing on an electric piano you can't focus on the same kind of things that you would normally, so I’ve found myself focusing on what I consider to be the essence of a piece, usually the emotional impact, and that's been a really useful thing to learn in the prison environment because when you take that back out onto the concert stage it just adds an immediacy to the performances that perhaps I didn't have before. 

There was a school piano I performed on once, it was astonishing, I've never seen anything like it at any other point. It was an acoustic upright but it was tiny and it had about five and a half octaves in a very odd configuration that I'd never encountered. I was doing a lot of really virtuosic repertoire and had to move things up and down octaves. You just have to do it, and it's a really good way to cap any ego you might have because you cannot be a diva, and kids especially would not tolerate any kind of messing around, so you have to do your best and hope that you can still communicate what's vital about this music. 

It's clear to me that research and exploration, going beyond simply learning the music, is fundamental to how you work. 

I haven't really thought about my motivations for that explicitly, except that from a social point of view, it's obvious that the kind of repertoire we mostly perform now does not represent humanity as a whole. I’ve always done a lot of research into unusual repertoire, but it's become more geared towards race and gender in recent years. If you perform music composed by women to little girls in schools, they immediately engage in a different way, and it's something they can aspire to, and it's the same performing to an audience with people from a wide range of ethnicities. If you include a person of colour as a composer, it's sometimes really moving for people because they've never heard a live performance of music by someone of the same race as them, and that's a privilege that as white person I have taken for granted. It's really important that we make music accessible and available to everybody at every level. 

Do you do any teaching yourself? 

I do a bit; I don't have regular students, but I do masterclasses which I really enjoy. It's good to be able to focus on the performing and playing a part in promoting music that has been ignored for so long.