My involvement in Lucy Parham’s ‘I, Clara’ came out of ‘Beloved Clara’, which we’ve been performing together for some years, and which explores the letters and diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann. These projects, whereby the exploration of composers’ lives throws light on their musical creations, are endlessly fascinating – of course, you don’t need to know about a composer to appreciate his or her work, but to listen to a Robert Schumann piece having learned it was the last piece he wrote before being committed to an asylum allows you to be drawn into his music through an added lens. Lucy and I started to feel more and more strongly that, particularly with this year being the bicentenary of Clara’s birth, she should be celebrated on her own terms – as a composer and a pianist, but also as a wife and a mother.

‘I have long been obsessed with the rhythm of languages, which can contain or communicate as much as the literal sense of the words’

There are so many women across the arts who are chronically buried or underestimated, and I’m fascinated in rescuing them. I’m interested in the classical canon, but only if it relates to now. We like to talk about us being the first generation of women who’ve had to juggle things, but Clara had to do it all. She had eight children, she was teaching and performing, and she composed. I have to be honest and say that Robert’s music reaches me deeper, but look, she had no role models when it came to female composers. Her letters reveal how she censored herself and was censored by others, how she didn’t allow herself to practise her craft fully because her responsibility was to prioritise her husband’s talent and look after their children. ‘Marriage kills the creative instinct,’ she wrote. If you look at what she had to overcome to be a composer, that marks her out. It’s a measure of her talent that she was driven to do it at all.

I adore working with Lucy. To sit beside her at the piano, to see her hands on the keyboard, is such a privilege. Hers is a physical relationship with the music – what it costs her is astonishing. When you’re up close, you see the sweat, the muscle power – she channels everything through the music. I’ve always loved working with musicians. I get a great thrill when I’m on stage with an orchestra – I love being the spoken voice inside an orchestral expression, and I love the combination of instruments and the spoken voice. I have long been obsessed with the rhythm of languages, which can contain or communicate as much as the literal sense of the words. All these factors – the heartbeat, the breath, the senses, the workings of the mind – fuse together to create rhythms which speak of an internal life. And this is what the spoken word and music have in common.

I’m the youngest of three, and for some reason my parents decided I was the musical one so I had to learn the piano from the age of six. A few years later, we were living in Malta because my dad, who was extremely musical, was in the army and stationed there. We were at home and my dad was accompanying a clarinettist. Out of the sitting room came the sound of a clarinet playing what I now know was the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. I remember it like yesterday – I was frozen, I couldn’t move. After that, I told my parents I wanted to learn the clarinet, but my dad told me I had to play the oboe instead. I accepted it and was grateful to him (he’d always wanted to play the oboe but never had the chance); after the first few months, I absolutely loved it and even now, when I hear the oboe in the middle of an orchestral sound, it still makes me shiver. I still have my oboe, but I don’t play it, it’s too depressing – the embouchure muscles aren’t there now. I do sit down at the piano though – my dad’s baby grand lives in our sitting room.

The speed of life has driven out music, in some respects. I’m on the run all the time, so I listen to less classical music than I used to. I might listen in the car, but my preference would be for contemporary vocal music. I struggle with opera though, particularly anything written before Britten. The music might be magnificent but that’s not enough. I think Britten did for opera what Sondheim did for musical theatre; he radically reinvented the form, he infused it with a psychological intelligence – which is surely what any actor is looking for.

This article originally appeared in the October 2019 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today