© David Shepherd

On Friday, a cello concerto by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, ‘Earth, Sea, Air’, will be performed at the BBC Proms. Cellist Laura van der Heijden and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will reprise the piece that they premiered in Glasgow in 2023 under the baton of Ryan Wigglesworth.

The concerto is sandwiched between works by Britten and Elgar – two composers with connections to English regional landscapes. As its title suggests, nature is a key theme in this concerto, but its influence is more particular than at first appears. Cheryl’s own comprehensive note about the work – combining facts about swifts, phytoplankton and volcanoes – reads a bit like a script to a David Attenborough documentary. I offered to interview Cheryl to find out more about her approach to writing about the natural world. 

She’s recently moved to the countryside near Cambridge, and at various points in our Zoom call, I could hear a bird loudly singing through her window. I asked her if it’s the peculiarities of nature, the individual species, that intrigue her the most in her work, rather than general notions of landscapes.

‘You know, I’ve never thought about it, but that is very true. I haven’t written pieces inspired by…the view from the top of a hill, or something. It’s the specificity of it that inspires me. In a way makes it no different to the way I take inspiration from anything else’.

For this commission, Laura van der Heijden had suggested an environmental theme. But Cheryl was uncomfortable with the idea of composing in a preachy way. ‘I have a slight wariness of writing a big climate change piece…I mean what do I think it’s gonna do, people are gonna come to the Albert Hall and then stop using their cars? I mean of course not, right?’.

A Visiting Research Fellowship in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford gave her an academic entry point to composing the piece. The position was an opportunity she almost didn’t apply for, but which she now talks about with relish. ‘It was just absolutely wonderful, it changed my life really. I made friends with all these academics who shared lots of their research with me, and I wrote pieces taking inspiration from what they told me.’ An 18th-century summer house in the Fellows’ garden was furnished with a piano for her use.

Over coffee, Professor Thomas Richards, a specialist in Evolutionary Genomics, told her about experiments to make oceanic phytoplankton ingest a greater proportion of the world’s CO2 emissions. The idea of colourful plankton blooms inspired her approach to the concerto’s slow movement, making her think about ‘how orchestral harmonies might grow, change and fall’.

The modern resurgence of British nature writing has played its part in the concerto too. Charles Foster’s 2021 book The Screaming Sky is about swifts: the sleek, ever–airborne migratory birds, a colony of which nest in the tower of Oxford’s Natural History Museum. ‘There were a couple of really beautiful sentences that made me think about line’ she says of his work, part of a growing publishing trend which now colonises entire tables in Waterstones. The cello part, in her mind, became a swift ‘flying over land, water, and through the air’. Meanwhile, dramatic photographs of volcanoes from Earth on Fire by Bernhard Edmaier added to her mental imagery for the composition.

Searing pyroclastic flows are mercifully unfamiliar to Southend, where Cheryl was born, and likewise the rural surroundings of ‘posh North Essex’ that she moved to as a child. She went on to study at the Yehudi Menuhin school in Surrey, and then Cambridge. Having never lived in a big city, I ask her if nature has been important to her for as long as she can remember.

‘It’s always been something that I return to, and I think it’ll become more and more a theme of my work, actually. It seems to be what I gravitate to most naturally’.

It has also helped her to win recognition. Her 2021 orchestral song-cycle Scenes from the Wild picked up an Ivor Novello Award in the Large Ensemble category. The 70-minute work is based on Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist, a book which recounts how nature helped him through adolescence with autism. It won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, garnering widespread praise along the way. 

Cheryl read about 30 books in search of a story for her commission, which was originally to be an opera. ‘It took a year to find it, it was Radio 4 book of the week. Within a week I’d decided to set it. It’s a wonderful book. He feels like there’s no barrier between him and the natural world.’ McAnulty attended its premiere in Glasgow, but despite winning the Novello, neither a second performance nor a recording is currently on the horizon – a frustrating situation that’s familiar to many composers.

It’s perhaps a sign of an environmentally-conscious generation of young musicians that another of Cheryl’s recent commissions has a nature theme. The pianist Annie Lim handed her a copy of Sue Stuart-Smith’s The Well-Gardened Mind, after discovering the benefits of gardening during a long Vancouver lockdown. Cheryl’s piece for Lim, Dance Suite, takes its inspiration from the book and is premiered at Presteigne Festival in August. 

But it’s upcoming opportunities to collaborate with scientists that seem to really excite the composer. Her face lights up when she speaks about composing a string quartet for the 25th anniversary of the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology in Vienna. She explains that a root won’t extend unless it senses gravity, so you can’t lay it on horizontally on a microscope slide and expect to see any action. ‘I really love this idea…and the way that makes you think. Rather than just representing it with a note gradually going down, you want to think about gravity, how does gravity work in harmony for instance, and I guess you might say pulling from one tonal centre to another is a form of gravity, right?’

Neither is that the end of her laboratory adventures. A commission for the pianist Charles Owen has taken her to the Oxford Physics Department. ‘I literally didn’t even do science GCSE, they let me skip it so I could practise more’, she marvels. ‘Suddenly I’m in the sub-2-level basement of this building where they do experiments, and it’s all underground to avoid vibrations. There’s three scientists who are slowing down atoms, they’re all patiently explaining this to me. I just find it very, very exciting, and the fact that composition has allowed me to do all this stuff. It’s a great honour and a privilege to have access to these people.’

While the Merton College fellowship has opened doors, she had previously spent a year as Composer in Residence at Cambridge’s Psychiatry department, observing a group investigating early-onset psychosis. ‘It was a leap of faith and a pragmatic desire to get money that led to all of this’, she tells me. ‘It’s just a sort of desperation to be able to survive as a composer’. This approach to work can make her feel ‘a bit like a market trader’, but it has allowed her to compose full time. ‘Remarkably’, she says, ‘it keeps not going wrong. I have a very cheap lifestyle.’

What’s clear is that Cheryl’s innate energy and curiosity allows her to engage artistically in a bewildering array of subjects, whatever opportunities might come her way.

‘Earth, Sea, Air’ will be performed on Friday 26th July at the BBC Proms. A recording is available from Chandos.