Unforgetting Justin Connolly

Researcher: Neil Heyde

This project exploring and recording Connolly’s music for solo strings and small ensembles began in 2022. The recordings are planned to take place during 2024, alongside events and performances. Justin Connolly died in 2020, and Nicolas Hodges (dedicatee of Connolly’s Piano Concerto and Professor at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart) has been a driving force behind work with Novello to publish properly set scores of all of Connolly’s music. His work has been the inspiration for setting this project in motion at the Academy and his editorial work forms an essential component in preparing the material. Several of the pieces will form side-by-side projects with current Academy students, with the aim of introducing a new generation to detailed engagement with high modernism and strategies for performer-led recording. Metier, the new music label for the Divine Art Recordings group will be releasing the discs (expected in 2025).

Connolly was an inspirational teacher at the Academy from 1989-1996, and a deeply curious and collaborative colleague. His knowledge of and enthusiasm for repertoire well outside the mainstream was legendary, and his sharp intellectual engagement with every dimension of music making, from the most abstruse to the most pragmatic, was matched with a wonderfully generous and open spirit. The key aim of the project is to capture the legacy of his special sensibility by recording the following pieces for the first time. (Four pieces will also receive premieres – shown in bold.)

Tesserae C, for solo cello, op. 15/3 (1971)

Triad V, for violin, clarinet and cello, op. 19 (1971)

Ceilidh, for four violins, op. 29/1 (1976)

Celebratio super Ter in lyris Leo, for three violas and accordion, op. 29/2 (1994-5)

Collana, for solo cello, op. 29/3 (1995)

Gymel-B, for clarinet and cello, op. 39/2 (1995)

Celebratio per viola sola, op. 29/4 (2005)

String Trio, op. 43 (2009-10)

The project is led by Neil Heyde (cellist and Head of Postgraduate Programmes), working closely with Peter Sheppard Skaerved (violinist, violist, and Viotti Lecturer) and Mihailo Trandafilovski (violinist and composer), both of whom are Neil’s colleagues in the Kreutzer Quartet. Roger Heaton (clarinettist and Professor Emeritus, Bath Spa University) will record Gymel B with Neil, and Academy students will collaborate on the larger ensemble pieces.

Despite their difficulty – or perhaps because of it – many of these pieces were written for performers early in their careers. These pieces are often virtuosic in both senses of the word – demanding intense intellectual engagement to internalize the complex and constantly evolving materials, and also great physical dexterity and fluency. Collana (1995) was written for Neil Heyde and Tesserae C (1971) for Ralph Kirshbaum, both while in their 20s. But the most striking story is Ceilidh (1976), a commission from the Menuhin School, which Connolly chose to dedicate to its first performers (in their late teens) rather than the commissioner. It was premiered at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC (and performed in the US for President Gerald Ford and Queen Elizabeth II).

Although the project does not explicitly seek to answer the question of why this extraordinary music slipped from public consciousness, it aims to address that problem directly, and to offer to musicians of the future a ‘way in’ to understanding the special attributes of Connolly’s music (and more widely, some of the aspirations of the modernism of that period). In connection with the first performances of Collana, Connolly wrote an unusually lengthy letter to Neil Heyde, exploring elements of the creative process that would normally have been ‘lost’ to the rehearsal room. Although the piece had been written in close conversation, with the cello actively in play through much of it, the final ‘assembly’ before the premiere took place when it was impossible to meet in person for a run through. The letter ‘idealises’ what that rehearsal might have been from Connolly’s perspective, exploring the psychology and choreography of performance in detail as it relates to the specific features of the piece (and more broadly) and the limits and possibilities of notation. It is a guiding force for all of the work in the project and will be the subject of a journal article, to be assembled at the end of the process, exploring specific dimensions of the composer-performer relationship and ramifications through time.

Main image: Neil Heyde, Peter Sheppard Skaerved and Mihailo Trandafilovski recording at the Academy.

Acknowledgements

The project has been made possible by an Academy research grant.