BY JUANITA SIMMONDS
We’d like to give a warm welcome to Juanita in her first story as a CutCommon contributor!
As Australian musicians have done for generations, pianist Elli Welsh headed to London.
It was 2019, and she had received the Ena Williams Award for Postgraduate Study Overseas based on her solo piano performance. But Elli wanted to study and play collaboratively, so she enrolled in the Professional Diploma of Piano Accompaniment at the Royal Academy of Music.
Elli made the most of the performance opportunities, musical collaborations and instruction at the academy. But with the pandemic, she decided to return to Australia to finish her studies online.
Although remote learning had challenges around sound quality – and whether or not musicality can be imparted through the screen – she says this helped her develop a degree of musical independence. She must have been doing something right, because Elli was awarded a Distinction for her final recital.
Elli soon returned to London to answer her musical calling and, despite the ongoing effects of the pandemic on live music, remains optimistic about her classical music career.
During the first lockdown, she was the pianist and musical director for Quarantine Così, a “quarantine opera” that is now online. One unexpected benefit of the pandemic was time to study the language of lieder. This flowed into more ventures, and Elli recently announced her latest collaborative online project, Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch (Book 1).
A pianist working with singers and instrumentalists also needs good sight-reading skills, a solid technique, and sensitive musicianship – all of which Elli has developed with her piano teachers in Brisbane and London.
Elli spoke via Skype about the delights of working with singers and other musicians, and the conversation began around terminology, and whether playing piano with other musicians means a change of job description.
In this interview series, we document the COVID-19 impact on the Australian arts industry while facilitating a candid discussion about what it is like to work during this difficult time. We hope this series will bring hope and solidarity to our creative community – things we need now more than ever.
Collaborative pianist, piano accompanist, associate artist – do you have a preference?
I like to be called a pianist, first and foremost. I think there are a lot of people that do recognise the role of an accompanist and realise the importance of it and that a good accompanist is also a good pianist. It’s not ‘one or the other’, but there is also still very much that stigma, I think, of an accompanist being a lesser pianist. So I think until that changes completely, I would like to be called a pianist, because I think that encompasses everything and that’s how I like to see myself.
Why did you start learning the piano? Was it something you wanted to do, or did your parents suggest it?
I was about 7 when I started my piano lessons with my grandma. She was a pianist, and she taught my older sister when [my sister] was 9. Then I showed interest in the piano, and I wanted to start learning. I pretty much begged her, so she started teaching me.
She was my first teacher, but she was also the one that really showed me the importance of musicality. I remember her saying, ‘anyone can play the notes, but not anyone can make them sing’. So that struck a chord with me and has stayed with me ever since.
Was there a point when you became more interested in developing the ensemble side of piano playing?
I think my work in the piano ensemble [at high school] really made me very interested in ensemble playing. When I was in grade 9 was the first time that I accompanied – I accompanied the school choir. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t really know a career in that was possible.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my career. I just knew that I liked playing piano.
Did you have to study languages, to tie in with the repetiteur work?
I’d never done any study of languages formally until this year when I started learning German. I’m learning through the University of Queensland, an online course. Absolutely loving it – it’s great. It took COVID-19 to start learning a language.
With your Royal Academy of Music study, were you more tending towards working with singers rather than instrumentalists?
I had always preferred working with singers as opposed to instrumentalists. But then when I got to the academy, although the majority of my work was with singers, I did really want to develop my skills working with other instrumentalists.
I developed some relationships with some string players, and a tuba player, and a couple of other people, so that’s been really good. And I really hope to keep those relationships and keep working with those people.
But there’s something about working with singers that I’ve always loved. I’ve always loved working with other people. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I just love accompanying and collaborating so much. But [there’s something] immediate about working with singers. I like the language side of things combined with the music, and generally I find singers a lot of fun.
Below: Elli is working with singers on Project Lieder, with its inaugural performance featuring the first cycle of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch.
So what were the highlights of your academy study?
I performed a lot at the academy. I had my first outside-the-academy performance scheduled for [around June], but then of course that got cancelled because of COVID.
A lot of the performance venues within the academy are so beautiful and acoustically amazing – I really enjoyed those experiences. And I played for a lunchtime concert once, which was open to the public so that was really exciting; and quite a few masterclasses.
I really expanded particularly my vocal repertoire, and because I was having to learn a lot, very quickly, my sight reading improved a lot.
James Baillieu [my teacher] solidified my technique, but in a way as to make it easier. He helped me release a lot of tension when I play, and so that improved my playing a lot more because a lot more things became possible.
The quarantine opera, how did that work?
Chris [Clement McNee, director] was working with [soprano and CutCommon contributor] Bridget O’Brien, and they mapped out the whole opera – what bits we were going to keep, what bits we were going to cut, and how the staging would work. Each week, we had a couple of arias, or a couple of ensemble pieces. We would talk, all of us, over Zoom to discuss the week’s music, and I would say how I had interpreted it, and what sort of tempi I was thinking, and stylistic and artistic things about it.
I would produce a recording of the aria or the piece, and then I would send it to the singers involved. Then, they would record their parts to the recording, and then they would send their vocal tracks to me. I would then fit it all together, and make sure it all lined up.
The trickiest parts were lining up fermatas: so that everyone was on the same page, we had to be mathematical about it, which is obviously very different to live collaboration. I would [record and] send the finished product to Chris. And then he would use that – as he was directing the staging for it – over Zoom, with the singers, and he would piece it all together.
In the first couple of weeks, it was a lot of trial and error and sorting out things, and then we got more and more used to it, and it became a bit more natural. We released it online and advertised it as much as we could.
What do you feel are the chances for live performance, given lockdown restrictions?
I’m really hopeful. I wouldn’t mind doing another online opera production like the Quarantine Cosi, because that was a lot of fun, and it enables me to learn a full opera.
I’m looking at a couple of different competitions and courses. I’m not sure yet if they’ll still be going ahead, everything’s so uncertain; you can’t know for sure. But I’m hopeful that by the [2021] spring/summer I’ll start to be performing more live again.
Until then, maybe another online opera production, and just getting my rep – practising as much as I can.
I have a couple of things now that I really want to learn and am trying to work on them. So, song cycles like Dichterliebe, Schwanengesang, and a lot of cello sonatas – I love working with cellists – and some Beethoven violin sonatas that I really want to play.
Watch the first episode of Quarantine Cosi below.
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If you like, you can say thanks to Juanita for volunteering for Australian arts journalism during COVID-19. No amount too much or little 🙂
Pay what you like via PayPal, 80 per cent to the writer and 20 per cent to our volunteer editor. Images supplied. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
