Elena Langer, composer

Who or what are the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?

-When I was 13, my mother found me a fantastic, unorthodox teacher in Moscow. He ran an experimental class where he made us improvise and compose music, read and write poems and perceive music and art as a whole. It was a privilege to study at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where I learnt a number of important skills for a composer – orchestration, pastiche, harmony, etc.

Leaving Russia and moving to London was challenging, and also life-changing: being immersed in a completely new cultural life and meeting new musicians/poets/writers.

Working at the Almeida Theatre made me realise that opera and setting text was my escape from what seemed to me the dead-end of contemporary avant-garde concert music

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

To get my opera To Die For (original title: The Suicide – A Comedy) produced in the West after it was commissioned and then cancelled in Russia in 2022.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece?

I find deadlines helpful. Also, I have reached now a point in my life and career where I can say “no” if I don’t find a commission interesting. But on the whole, I like commissions: aren’t they proof that someone wants to play and hear my music? – the ultimate goal of any composer!

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles or orchestras?

I find it very satisfying to write for specific musicians and singers – for example, the soprano Anna Dennis, who has been my close friend since we studied at the Royal Academy of Music. I know her voice really well, and we have collaborated many times. Here she sings ‘Stay O Sweet’, my setting of a stanza from John Donne:

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed several of my works over the years, and I feel a special connexion to its musicians individually and to their bright and strong sound as a whole. Perhaps when I orchestrate I always have the BSO sound in my mind. Here they perform my Figaro Gets a Divorce orchestral suite at Tanglewood:

I particularly like working with the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, who frequently conducts my Figaro Gets a Divorce suite with various orchestras – each time he makes it sound fresh and different. Once I was surprised when heard it on the radio, and Maxim’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra was playing it on gut strings!

Which works are you most proud of?

I think it would be my dark comic opera To Die For. But I haven’t heard it yet! – it is being premiered in Holland by the Netherlands National Reisopera in spring 2026, and later in 2026 it’s coming to the UK.

I also like my cantata-meets-cello concerto The Dong with a Luminous Nose, for orchestra and chorus, a setting of a romantic nonsense poem by Edward Lear. Here it is performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Andrey Boreyko

My opera Figaro Gets a Divorce:

How would you characterise your compositional language?

It is hard to describe my own music! I like writing expressive vocal lines and lush and varied orchestral textures. This no doubt stems from my training at the Moscow Conservatory where that marvellous Russian sound-world of Rimsky-Korsakov still has a strong influence. I try to create contrast and humour and sadness through music.

How do you work?

I sit down in the morning and write notes

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

There are these rare wonderful moments when I feel satisfied with the music I have written and when the audience seems to think the same and is engaged – it is fantastic when these two things coincide!

What advice would you give to young/aspiring composers?

Give up unless you truly can’t live without writing music

About the London Piano Festival

Please tell us about your new work, Seasons, which is receiving its premiere at the London Piano Festival this year.

The LPF commissioned me to write a piece inspired by Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, a genius cycle of salon piano pieces, many of which are much more than just a pleasant pastime for 19th-century amateur pianists. You can hear nostalgic echoes from Eugene Onegin in them, and sometimes the pieces sound almost orchestral, something like his symphonies. Each piece describes a month of the year and each has an epigraph from Russian poetry – Pushkin, Nekrasov, Maikov. The epigraphs were suggested to Tchaikovsky by Nikolay Matveyevich Bernard, the editor of the St Petersburg music magazine Nouvellist, who commissioned the pieces.

The epigraphs seem to me quite external, basically about the weather. I suddenly had the idea of finding my own epigraphs in poems by Philip Larkin, which, while they talk about the seasons, are very internal, contemporary, funny and dark… Also I wanted to create something new for the London Piano Festival, what I jokingly called my “Tchaikovsky sandwich”, and to make my pieces really play with and interact with the Tchaikovsky. So I reshuffled the Tchaikovsky cycle completely, and inserted my own four pieces in between, to be performed non-stop. My pieces are harmonically connected with Tchaikovsky’s pieces, growing out of the last chord, and each of my endings prepares for the next Tchaikovsky piece.

This “Tchaikovsky sandwich” is a continuous piano event, and lasts just over an hour. It starts with Tchaikovsky’s March, April and May, immediately followed by my Spring; then his June, July and August followed by my Summer and so on. My Spring was inspired by Larkin’s lines:

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,

Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water

Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter…

The music is silvery and bright, with birdsong, and murmuring, and splashing sounds of water.

Summer is heralded by the following lines:

Too often summer days appear

Emblems of happiness

I can’t confront…

The music is static, nostalgic, slightly drunk…

The mood in Autumn grows darker; it is a virtuosic fast piece which I imagined like a scary leaf-storm, a whirlwind.

And now the leaves suddenly lose strength

Decaying towers stand still, lurid, lanes-long…

My final piece, The Lark in Winter, follows Tchaikovsky’s February and finishes off the cycle. It is quite dark and symphonic; towards the end it has some echoes of Tchaikovsky’s March (which started the cycle) but very angular and transformed. Here are Larkin’s lines for my Winter:

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow…

My Seasons are also constructed so that they can be performed without the Tchaikovsky.

What is your most treasured possession?

My house and my old German piano.

What is your present state of mind?

Irritation and hunger.

Katya Apekisheva performs the world premiere of Elena Langer’s new work, The Seasons, at the opening recital of the 10^th anniversary edition of the London Piano Festival (9-12 October) at Kings Place.

Artist image: Anastasia Tikhonova