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Ryan Wigglesworth cuts a confident figure striding through the Royal Academy of Music in London. He’s been a professor here since 2019 – juggling his duties with his role as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, guest conducting internationally, regular recitals as a pianist, and a busy schedule as a composer. Oh, and he’s also the father of three “boisterous” young children, whose sleepless antics have left him bleary and clutching his coffee this morning.
He sits at the head of the long table in the Academy’s oak-panelled boardroom, looking perfectly at home. Was he inevitably going to end up here?
Wigglesworth, 46, squirms at the suggestion. “I certainly wasn’t confident as a child,” he’s quick to correct. “I was actually very timid and shy. Maybe that helped; I just used to blend in with the furniture, so no one noticed I was there.”
But he stood out sufficiently at nursery school – “A strange boy, belting out hymns” – that a teacher took notice and he was sent to audition for Sheffield Cathedral Choir where this son of a butcher, the only boy from “the wrong side of the city”, was swept up into an entirely new world.
“You become a chameleon in that sort of situation; you learn pretty quickly to adapt. I was very lucky that Graham Matthews – the man in charge of music at the Cathedral – took me under his wing when he saw how fanatically interested I was,” he says.
Matthews’ intervention opened big doors: Charterhouse, an organ-scholarship to Oxford, Guildhall, Cambridge. But Wigglesworth’s real education was always informal, first with his father’s LPs – “He subscribed to this Great Composers magazine, the kind that comes with those faux-leather folders, but also with recordings” – and then via the radio and the music collection of the Sheffield Central Library – “That really was my happy place – a total treasure trove …”
Which is how, age 12, Wigglesworth first came to Aldeburgh.
“I devoured the Humphrey Carpenter biography of Benjamin Britten, then pestered my parents until they agreed to make a trip down. It was a kind of pilgrimage.” The relationship only intensified after Wigglesworth met composer (and, then, friend and mentor) Oliver Knussen.
“I’d heard his Third Symphony on the radio. It knocked me for six – music I never dreamed existed. So I sat down and tried to figure out what he’d done. I then wrote him a long letter. Six weeks later an extraordinarily generous reply arrived, full of great advice, lots of it similar to what he’d received from Britten himself as a young composer.”
He describes theirs as “the central musical relationship of my life”, his formative years spent sitting in rehearsals at the festival’s Snape Maltings concert hall, where Knussen was artistic director for more than a decade, soaking it all in.
“You weren’t just learning rehearsal technique,” he explains. “You’d hear a score pulled apart, see the nuts and bolts. I used to do the same with the Proms; before security tightened up you could just wander into rehearsals. I saw some incredible musicians.”
It was the final puzzle-piece in an eclectic, often accidental, musical apprenticeship that, Wigglesworth explains, started “pretty much as soon as I could read music”. He always composed. Early scribblings (“Poor imitations of whatever I was playing at the time!”) gradually gained focus, leading in turn to his first serious forays into conducting at university. “I only started putting together ensembles because no one else seemed too eager to conduct my pieces.”
Wigglesworth is back (no sneaking in this time) at Aldeburgh this week, helping shape the festival’s focus as featured artist. It is, he says, “A rare opportunity to wear all my different hats at once, to think deeply about programming. It’s a wonderful, complex art – thinking about what piece, juxtaposed with another, can create something entirely new.”
A centrepiece of his season – and Wigglesworth’s first thought when he got the phone call – is Debussy’s only opera, the ravishing, ambiguous, 1902 Pelléas et Mélisande, performed with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra he has directed since 2022. “I don’t know many composers for whom it’s not their favourite opera,” he says. “It has this multidimensional effect, like looking at a crystal, because there are so many things going on simultaneously. I’ve been longing for years to perform it.”
The performances reunite him with Rory Kinnear, who made his opera-directing debut with the premiere of Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale in 2017 and who directs this semi-staging. “His instinct from the get-go was to develop a light-touch approach which just amplifies what’s happening in a scene. The orchestra will be on stage and he plans to integrate them dramatically, weaving physical paths through them,” he says.
Another familiar face will be soprano Sophie Bevan, AKA Mrs Wigglesworth, as the elusive Mélisande. Family life in rural Oxfordshire with their young family has recently been punctuated with opera talk as they grapple with this strange heroine.
“I mean, where the hell does she come from?” says Wigglesworth. “Has she escaped from Bluebeard’s Castle? Her opening line – ‘Don’t touch me!’ – is always performed as though she’s terrified, but if you do what Debussy specifically writes it’s much more measured, assertive. She’s actually saying: don’t try and break into my world.”
There will be Wigglesworth’s own music, too, in a festival that includes his 2019 piano concerto (performed by Steven Osborne), a cycle of George Herbert songs curated for Bevan – “I want to write more and more for her. There are very few singers who have her ability to communicate directly with an audience without histrionics, without filter” – as well as the premiere of a viola concerto written for longtime collaborator Lawrence Power.
“I think all composers hope that with each new piece we’re doing something different, but I genuinely do with this one. It’s more spacious, less cluttered than anything I’ve written before – a kind of economy I’m hoping also blooms and blossoms.”
For a composer whose meticulously crafted music is keenly aware of the past, often explicitly in dialogue with history, Wigglesworth’s starting point is surprisingly human. “I can’t write a note,” he admits, “unless there’s a specific personality I’m composing for. If I receive a commission from an individual or group I’ve no relationship with there’ll be no ideas.”
Is it frustrating to be a composer in a world where classical music – especially new music – is increasingly treated with suspicion? He sighs in a don’t-get-me-started sort of way. “Over the course of the 20th century we’ve somehow developed this idea that composing is a specialised business, separate to the rest of music-making and life. It’s meant that new music becomes pigeonholed: a thing that sits over there, that doesn’t relate to the rest, so as an audience member it feels like you’re navigating your way through a set of islands. There must be a way of joining it all up again,” he says.
“There are so many challenges facing classical music currently, and it’s tempting to retreat artistically, to become ever more conservative, but that has to be resisted at all costs. For it to survive, new music must be at its heart.”
It’s a very personal concern for Wigglesworth, juggling dual roles as composer and conductor. “There is never enough time for composing,” he admits. “And the older I get the more time I need.” A studio close to home provides a place to hide away to write, where days often start with him playing some Bach before “flitting between piano and desk, praying something will emerge”.
Since 2022 however, the balance has shifted. At 43, Wigglesworth took his first regular conducting position with an ensemble: chief conductor of the Glasgow-based BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It was a happy chance, he says, a steady relationship he had never expected as a career-freelancer, but one whose shifting currents he now relishes.
“That conductor-orchestra relationship is so subtle and hard to pin down. Every orchestra is a group of brilliant individuals, but also has a collective personality and ethos, which makes the interaction endlessly fascinating,” he says.
Wigglesworth marvels at his players’ chameleon quality – “I find it genuinely astonishing that they can turn instantly from beautifully stylish Mozart to ink-wet scores” – which will be at the fore in two Proms this summer. The orchestra’s 90th birthday has prompted an unusual programme: works by Rachmaninov, Bartók and Varèse all premiered in 1936, each “startlingly original”. It’s a snapshot of an era of multiplicity and boldly distinctive voices, a reminder of the shock of the old.
Later in the season there’ll be the world premiere of an orchestral song-cycle by Brett Dean, The World’s Wife, setting poems by Carol Ann Duffy. It’s framed with typical Wigglesworth eclecticism by Judith Weir’s Moon and Star (“A knockout masterpiece and a real ear-opener – a magical way of opening a programme”) and Elgar’s Symphony No 1 – the first live work the orchestra performed after Covid and one Wigglesworth is visibly passionate about.
“I’ve been keen in Scotland to ensure we have longrunning threads through the work we do. It’s so important for us to return to music that’s impossible to exhaust. That’s how we develop. The Elgar is full of very subtle shifts of colour, shadows that just pass over the musical surface – I just adore it.”
A new generation – of concert-goers as well as performers – are essential to classical music’s future. Would a Ryan Wigglesworth born today still become a musician? Are the networks and resources still in place? Wigglesworth thinks not. It’s a problem he’s navigating first-hand with his own children. “We’ve got to tackle the business of music education, to stop relying on or expecting government support. Help isn’t coming. Politics is too short-termist and this needs to be sorted out for the long term and its crucial importance recognised. I so desperately want to make that my priority in the coming years.
“My children go to a wonderful music academy on a Saturday morning in High Wycombe – set up by a bunch of parents who were sick of the fact that there was no music education in schools. It’s completely self-supporting, doesn’t cost very much, and what you get is incredible. There has to be a way of expanding that model. We’ve always relied on people coming to classical music later in life, but if no seed has been planted how on earth can you expect people to have that curiosity?
