Interview, Wonderland, a new collaborative work by 13 contemporary composers

This delightful project is the culmination of a concert tour begun in 2015, to mark the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's surreal work, Alice in Wonderland. In the spirit of collaborative works such as the F.A.E. Sonata, thirteen contemporary composers contributed a movement each, and Louis de Bernières (most famous as the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin) wrote a script to accompany the music.

This album is in fact doubly special, as not only is it the premiere recording of this fascinating work, but it's also aiming to raise money for the music therapy course at Helen House Children's Hospice in Oxford, UK - violinist Matthew Trusler, who performs with pianist Ashley Wass on Wonderland, is the head of the Lenny Trusler Children's Foundation, which raises money for this and other children's health projects, and I spoke to him earlier in the week about the project.

Where did the idea first come from to commission a new work based on this story – and why did you decide to make it collaborative, rather than engaging just one composer to write it all?

Ashley had recently become a trustee of my foundation, the Lenny Trusler Children’s Foundation, and we were looking for a big project to get really stuck into in order to raise some money. We were well aware of the upcoming Alice anniversary, and Ashley suddenly blurted out that it would be fun to commission a new piece for every chapter. 13 chapters, 13 composers. Honestly I thought he was joking. It seemed massively over-ambitious, especially since neither of us are particularly well connected with the world of new music and composers.

But we came up with a list of those we knew we loved, and thought we could reach, and agreed to split the list up between us and have a go. Amazingly the first 5 we tried all said yes, which led us to believe the whole challenge would only take us a day and a half. But then things got a bit more sticky, with some people proving harder to reach, and finally a very late drop out causing us immense anxiety and in Ashley’s case mild hypertension. Calling up Howard Blake, at his home, and asking him to perform a last minute stand-in for someone else still ranks as one of the more ridiculous ideas I’ve been involved in, but luckily he is an incredibly generous man and he couldn't wait to help. Louis de Bernieres was our first and only choice to write the new script as we really do love him, and are well aware of his fondness for music. When he agreed to take part we were over the moon.

When he delivered his script with a full 23 hours to go before the premiere, it felt simply magnificent. I was sitting on a train when it came through, and I whooped, out loud, on my own.

Finally Emily Woodard, being the most wonderful illustrator we could have been lucky enough to meet, gave an unimaginable amount of time and energy to create 13 magical new pictures for the story.

Are there any unifying elements between the movements (beyond the story)? Did you give the participating composers any brief in terms of style or shared themes, or did they have a completely free hand?

We gave them nothing! Initially we offered them a choice of chapters, but as they started snapping them up we couldn't anymore so we simply assigned them as we went along. Part of the fun was in saying to these composers that they could do anything they wanted, carte blanche to create something completely new for their part of the story.

Perhaps a very broad question, but… why do you think collaborative works like this are so rare? Most people have heard of the F.A.E. Sonata, but there are few others.

It’s quite hard to pull off - random styles and textures can be jarring. I think in the case of Wonderland the story unifies it all really nicely, but if you're looking for a straightforward listening experience it’s perhaps more obvious to take one person and let them control the entire arc of the piece. All in all we think, for this project, it adds far more than it takes away though.

Do you envisage any follow-up albums, perhaps themed around other popular stories?

Oh yes!

We have many plans…in fact we are already performing a new retelling of the classic story of The Firebird. Perhaps because Ashley and I both have young children, we both absolutely love putting together projects involving stories. It keeps us feeling young!