Interview, Roxanna Panufnik on Heartfelt

Widely acclaimed for her harmonically sensuous Westminster Mass in the late 1990s, Roxanna Panufnik has remained a key presence among British composers ever since, developing a musical language that blends the conventionally tonal with touches of unexpected spice. She's also embraced a very broad sweep of inspirations – her previous album Celestial Bird with Ex Cathedra saw collaboration with Indian arts organisation Milapfest and a number of works melding Western Classical elements with Indian traditions.

Heartfelt takes this theme of electicism if anything still further, stepping at times outside the choral idiom that Panufnik has mostly been associated with and drawing variously on medieval English legends, Eastern European Gypsy music, the writings of Myanmar's sometime dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, and imagery of Uzbek traders plying the Silk Road. The most striking influence of all – and the origin of the beast that graces the cover – is to be found in her string quartet Heartfelt, whose second movement is based on a recording the heartbeat of a real bear undergoing surgery.

I spoke to Roxanna about this vividly varied album, and the way she pulls together such diverse inspirations with unifying themes.

Influenced by the Western Front, Eastern Europe, Central and South-Eastern Asia (not to mention the bear!), this is a dizzyingly varied album. What would you say were the main strands running throughout it?

The heart! Every piece is connected to this organ – physically and/or emotionally.

You’re often described as principally a choral composer – though, clearly, not exclusively so. How accurate do you think that label is, and how happy are you with it?

I’m very proud to be associated with the choral genre which, in the UK, is one of the best in the world. But what with this chamber CD and currently writing my 3rd opera, I hope that people will begin to associate me with all forms of music!

Some composers approach non-verbal composition quite differently from word-setting. Would you say this was true of you, in the wordless pieces on this album?

If you’re setting words, the whole rhythm, structure and duration of that piece will be dictated by how you set them. Personally, I love having that template to work from – it’s much more of a challenge to start from the blank canvas that is purely instrumental music!

The first movement of Private Joe switches between speech and song at some points – is there a particular significance to these changes in terms of what the text is doing at those moments?

Generally, when he speaks it’s more his internal voice than what he’s saying in the letter. I also use speech in the piece to emphasize particularly dramatic moments (of which there are quite a few…). I’m particularly in awe of how baritone Roderick Williams switches accents (both sung and spoken) seamlessly – whether it be Huddersfield or East London cockney.

When Letters from Burma was commissioned in the 2000s based on her writings, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi was a dissident under house-arrest. Since then she’s campaigned for reform, governed the country herself and, most recently, been removed by the military. Do you think its original themes still hold the same resonance today?

Completely. We seem to have come full circle with Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest at the time of composing but then, whilst we were recording last year, castigated for allegedly turning a blind eye to the plight of Rohingya Muslims. And now she’s under house arrest again. Whatever the international community thinks of her, she is a beacon of democracy to her own people – hundreds of whom have been killed, injured or disappeared since the military coup, earlier this year. The final movement “Kintha Dance”, which draws its influence from traditional Burmese sword dancers, is a defiant paean to those who are courageous enough to fight back at the regime, despite it trying to squash them.

When you’re commissioned to write test-pieces for competitions, as with the Hora Bessarabia, do you set out to write intentionally tricky works to probe the musicians’ technical abilities?

That is the brief but I work closely with professionals to make sure I’m not asking the impossible! I was very lucky and delighted to have violinist Tasmin Little advise me for Hora Bessarabia. I always make sure there’s a slow lyrical section where contestants can relax(!) and show off their individual emotional and interpretative skills.

The ability to capture a recording of an animal’s heartbeat during surgery is a medical marvel that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago, as would the concept of monitoring players’ heart-rates during a performance. How much do you draw on technological progress for new ways to think about music?

I rely hugely on technology – particularly the internet, for all the research I do. I also use social media for sounding ideas out or when I’m stuck for a title! In fact, it was Facebook that came to the rescue when my approaches to zoological societies were ignored, leading me to Albie the bear at Bristol’s Wild Place Project. I am also probably far too reliant on the playback facility of my musical notation software as I have a kind of rhythmic dyslexia and need its endorsement that I’ve written what I thought I heard in my head…