Esther Abrami on WOMEN

Released on Sony Classical last month, French violinist Esther Abrami's new album of music by female composers casts its net far and wide, including the world premiere of Ina Boyle's Violin Concerto, arrangements of pieces by Hildegard von Bingen, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Ethel Smyth and Holocaust victim Ilse Weber, and Abrami's own new composition Transmission (which brings the programme to a close).

I spoke to Esther about her own exposure (or lack thereof) to music by women as a student and how she's using her powerful social media presence to inspire the next generation of violinists and their teachers to widen their repertoire, the remarkable stories behind some of the pieces on the album, why she feels it's a pity that young musicians aren't always encouraged to pursue composition alongside their performing activities, and the role which her maternal grandmother played in her own development as a composer-performer...

This is the world premiere recording of Ina Boyle’s gorgeous Violin Concerto, which isn’t often performed - how did you come across it, and do you have plans to change that?

I really wanted to find a violin concerto by a woman to include on the album, and it took a lot of digging to find one: nowadays Florence Price’s first concerto is getting programmed a lot and that’s wonderful, but I felt sure that there must be something else from our side of the pond! Last summer I read pretty much every book I could find about women composers and did a lot of online research, then somehow this incredible piece popped up in a playlist of videos with hardly any views…

I found a biography on the Ina Boyle Society’s website, so I ordered a copy and thought her story was quite beautiful. When I found out that she was a student of Vaughan Williams, the pieces all started coming together: The Lark Ascending is very dear to me (it’s the first piece I performed at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) and I found that her style in the concerto was really quite similar. There was one letter in the biography which mentioned that she never really got the fame that Vaughan Williams thought she deserved, and I thought it would be lovely if we could finally bring her some of that recognition all these years later.

The concerto is stunning and really deserves to be performed more: even within the classical music world I find so few people who’ve heard of Ina Boyle, and I’d love to play a part in changing that. It hasn’t been announced yet, but a US orchestra will perform it with me in 2026 – they wanted to hire me, I pushed for this piece, and they agreed! Hopefully this is only the beginning, and orchestras in the UK will be interested in programming it too…

The album ends with one of your own pieces, Transmission: have composing and performing always gone hand-in-hand for you?

When I was young I loved to improvise and compose – I still have a little notebook of simple compositions I wrote when I’d just started learning music. I always enjoyed playing freely without a score, and I think it’s a shame that the whole process of improvisation is more or less taken away once we get into formal classical music education. Of course it’s important to learn repertoire, but I have misgivings about the way we separate composers from performers. It wasn’t always like this: people like Clara Schumann, Liszt and Ravel all played their own music in sell-out concerts, but so few musicians feel able to do both these days.

That was certainly my experience: for a long time I left composition behind and concentrated on the violin, because playing to a high standard requires so much time and energy. I went off to Chetham’s, then to the Royal College of Music and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and throughout all of that I was really just focused on honing my technique and mastering the core concertos.

It was only really after graduation that I realised how few pieces by women were in my repertoire, and that inspired me to restart composing myself. I feel very lucky that I was given the chance to be in touch with wonderful composers like Anne Dudley and Rachel Portman, who are both included on my album: working with them made me want to curate a whole programme of music by women.

When I was studying the lives of these women on the album, I realised that the reason we remember them today is that they left something behind for us. Playing and recording other people’s music is wonderful, but I wanted to create a little legacy of my own too so I thought it would be lovely to write something to close the album.

What’s the story behind the title?

I’ve called my piece ‘Transmission’, because I’m fascinated by how music gets passed down in our genes. My mum knows how to play the piano, but that real passion for music skipped a generation - the spark came from my grandmother. I was talking to someone recently who told me that it’s incredibly rare to be the sole musician in your family: nearly all of us have a musical ancestor somewhere on the family tree, even if you have to go back a long way!

My grandmother was a very fine violinist, but she put that career aside when she got married and had children. When I was three years old I spent the summer holidays at her house in the North of France, and one day she got her little violin out and let me play with it - I think because she’d run out of ways to keep me entertained! There’s a photograph of me holding her violin as a toddler who’d only just discovered what a violin was, and I still have the instrument today (although it’s too fragile to travel with).

It was another seven years before I started taking the violin seriously, though: my parents waited for the desire to have lessons to come from me, and I’m very grateful for that because I don’t believe in pushing kids when they’re too young to make their own decisions. I remember going to a concert of klezmer music in the South of France which really lit a fire in me, so I took my first violin lesson when I was nine and it was love at first sight. 

There are so many to choose from, but can you pick out two or three women on this album whose stories particularly resonated with you?

Starting with England, Ethel Smyth is somebody I felt very strongly about - if we neglect her story then we’re missing out on a big chunk of straight-up history as well as music history. I’d heard the famous anecdote about her conducting the suffragettes with a toothbrush from her prison-cell at Holloway, and I really wanted to play in March of the Women but of course it’s a hymn! Recomposing it was an extremely interesting experience, and the first time I’d used voice-sampling on a recording: I chose Emmeline Pankhurst’s speech from Hyde Park Corner, which seemed very fitting. You don’t hear voice-sampling all that often in classical music, but I thought it made a great introduction to the album, and it could really tell the story of such an important figure. 

I was also very keen to include women from outside of Europe, for example the Brazilian composer and conductor Chiquinha Gonzaga who was one of the first people to push for performing rights and royalties for composers. Hers is an incredible story because she achieved so much with hardly any financial or practical support: she was pushed into an arranged marriage by her father, but left her husband because he wouldn’t accept her musical career. 

She was left alone with no money because her parents had disowned her, but through her music she managed to make a living and gradually became famous; her music was played so much in Brazil and she wasn’t making any money from people playing it, so she founded the Brazilian Society of Theater Authors in 1917. One of her pieces became the official piece of the carnival in Brazil, and I rearranged that for violin on the album. She was an amazing woman who fought for what she believed in and forged a huge career for herself, but barely anybody I talk to in Europe has heard of her!

There are also some incredibly moving stories, like that of Ilsa Weber: she was imprisoned in Theresienstadt, where she sang to the children to comfort them, and was eventually murdered at Auschwitz. One of the songs she composed was the haunting lullaby ‘Wiegala’, which I’ve arranged for the album: it was reported that she sang it to her young son and other children as they walked to the gas-chambers.

So much has been said and written about resistance, but we still rarely focus on the role which women played in that context – again it’s not even just about music, it’s about a whole chapter of history. People often ask me if I programme these composers just because they’re women, and my answer is ‘I programme them because they’re wonderful! Let’s shine a light on their stories and their music.’ 

You have a huge following on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok - how are you using those platforms to bring these stories to life?

What I’ve tried to do with this album (and with the videos I’m posting on my socials) is to present these composers in a way that’s approachable, as if I’m talking about someone you could meet rather than just a person you read about on a Wikipedia page. I like to mix facts about their musical career with little things about their personal lives, because there’s so much interesting stuff to share and it makes it more memorable. If you explain that Hildegard von Bingen was a Benedictine abbess who was born in 1098, it probably won’t stick in people’s minds - but pointing out that she was the first woman who wrote about female pleasure will grab their attention!

When I released the single and the video for the Ilse Weber piece, I received hundreds of messages asking for the score because so many people wanted to play it. I’m working hard on that, because that’s exactly what I hoped would happen: of course I want people to listen to the album, but I also want young violinists to start playing the music. Of course we need teachers to be proactive about giving their students music by women, but if a student goes to them and says ‘I want to play this!’ then we’re also tackling the problem the other way round.