Interview, Annelien Van Wauwe on FLOW

For her second recording on Pentatone, Belgian clarinettist and former BBC New Generation Artist Annelien Van Wauwe marries the familiar and the new by pairing two contrasting but connected works for basset clarinet and orchestra: Mozart's much-loved concerto from 1791 (written for Anton Stadler, who co-invented the instrument) and SUTRA, a new commission from her compatriot Wim Henderickx which draws inspiration from yoga and Sanskrit mantras.

I spoke to Annelien shortly before the premiere of SUTRA in Glasgow this month about the genesis of Henderickx's piece, the special joy of working on Mozart with conductor Andrew Manze, being an ambassador for the basset clarinet, and how her own daily yoga practice has transformed her musicianship.

How did you get into yoga, and what does your practice look like today?

I started ten or twelve years ago when I was in Berlin studying for a Masters in clarinet, and I had some issues with my arms - the typical kind of thing that affects musicians. The school had a whole department dedicated to different therapies for musicians: there was Alexander Technique, yoga, Feldenkrais, all sorts. I absolutely loved it and tried a bit of everything during the few months when I wasn't able to play, but I stuck with yoga: it really changed something, and I was completely cured from the injury I had. And over the next few years I also noticed how much it influenced things like concentration and focus and emotional states - basically everything you need as a musician to go on stage, and also generally in life.

Now it’s a daily habit: I wake up, have a cup of tea and get on my mat. It’s not usually for very long, maybe just half an hour, but it’s how I start every day; I have a very nice yoga mat that goes everywhere with me when I’m travelling, and also supports for the hands and feet. Videos are also useful if you’re touring and can’t get to a class: I very much like a website called DoYogaWithMe, which has some very good teachers and includes some quite advanced stuff. I don’t like teachers that talk too much, but that’s just a personal preference – everyone’s different!

Does Wim Henderickx share your enthusiasm for yoga?

He doesn’t practice yoga himself, but I would call him a bit of a guru of classical music inspired by Eastern themes – he’s travelled a lot and is very interested in meditation, Buddhism and all sorts of related things. I met him a few years ago when my chamber ensemble Carousel were preparing a piece of his; I invited him to come and works with us and conduct us a little bit, and it felt very natural.

I knew that I wanted something that would translate these main pillars of yoga into music, and thought he would be the perfect person to ask for this project. He’s really the No. 1 composer in Belgium, so usually you have to commission things from him years in advance, but as soon as I told him my idea he was completely on board with it even though he was in the middle of finishing an opera at the time!

Could you tell me a little about the soundworlds and structure of the piece, and how much input you had into that?

I basically left everything up to Wim, but it was my idea to integrate mantras into the piece: I sent Wim some that I knew in Sanskrit, and he chose to work with them as the subject of each movements. For instance, the first movement is called ‘Pranayama’, and that word is divided between all kinds of groups in the orchestra. The woodwind whisper it, then I whisper it, and that adds a very human element to the piece: you can hear people talking, but you don’t really know what is being said.

And at the very end of the process I decided I would really like to sing a melody – I’m not a singer, but it felt so natural to do that! Wim also works with sounds with a lot of air in them: there are moments where he has the musicians breathing audibly, and he also makes a lot of use of a ‘nosey’ sound (a technique he already knew for a long time). There’s also a beautiful passage with multiphonics, where he builds up this entire universe step by step, and then there are these amazing electronics - you have them in almost every movement and they also connect the movements, so there are no breaks between each one like in a regular concerto. It’s a single unbroken experience of half an hour.

Wim’s also a percussionist, so the entire piece is rhythmically extremely specific - but when you hear and play it everything seems to float, especially in the slow movements. There’s a fast movement that’s almost like something from The Rite of Spring and requires a lot of focus, but the others have this really meditative character because all the rhythms are not on a pulse but something in between.

It’s very inspiring and interesting to play a solo part with this kind of accompaniment; Wim presented me with the score two months before the recording, and everything was entirely playable, which isn’t always the case with new commissions! Wim really got to know the basset clarinet during the process, and the only things I suggested after seeing the draft were a couple of changes to exploit the lower register of the instrument, because I think that’s something really special.

How much new repertoire for basset clarinet has there been over the past decade or so?

I think there have been some chamber music pieces, but no other concerto as far as I know. Because the Mozart concerto is the one piece you really need it for, it’s only people who are very active as soloists who tend to own a basset clarinet.

I play a modern basset clarinet by a German manufacturer, which basically looks like an extended A clarinet with some extra keys - it’s quite a delicate mechanism. I played the Mozart concerto on it at the Proms seven years ago, but before doing so I have worked with another company to change the key system which made things much easier. We essentially moved away from the German approach of the basset key system towards something more French, then personalised it a bit – all the basset notes were in the little fingers, so it became much more comfortable.

I’d like to commission something for the instrument on every recording I do from now on - that’s a big promise to make, but I’ll do my best because I think it’s really important to enlarge the repertoire. And it’s fun for me to discover new things, so fingers crossed!

How did your friendship with Andrew Manze come about, and was it helpful to be conducted by someone who’s so familiar with Mozart concertos from a soloist’s perspective himself?

Andrew and I met in 2012, on a tour with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra where I was playing the Weber Concertino and some duets with my teacher Sabine Meyer. As a very young musician it was a wonderful opportunity to be performing alongside someone of Andrew’s stature in all these great venues, and right away I was very impressed by his musicianship. It was so amazing to do Classical repertoire in particular with him, because it’s absolutely his nature – he instinctively knows what to do with this music, especially in terms of getting that lightness of phrasing that’s so essential in Mozart. And he’s just such a kind person: everybody likes him, and he has this very natural authority which means that people catch what he wants to do immediately. I’d always dreamed of recording with him, so when this project came along I seized my chance!

I’d say his approach to conducting is very minimalist: this sort of repertoire doesn’t need big dramatic gestures from the conductor, but what it does need is finesse and Andrew just has that naturally. And I learned so much from working with him: I’ve been playing the Mozart concerto for such a long time, but even during the recording-sessions he convinced me try out new things in terms of tone-colours and variations. It’s so lovely to work with a conductor where you’re actually inspiring one another rather than it being a one-way process.

The video-trailer for the album shows you playing from the centre of the orchestra rather than out front – is that how you always perform the Mozart, or was it a new experiment for this project?

It’s something I’ve been doing for a few years, but only on recordings rather than in performances. It’s so much easier to connect with the other musicians and with the conductor when you can see each other face-to-face rather than having the conductor off somewhere in your left eye-line! And it creates the kind of perfect balance that you need for a recording: we did my very first recording for Pentatone, Belle Époque, like that, and for Wim’s piece it worked really well too in terms of visualising this idea of union and everybody together. And it’s just fun! I like having people around me.