THE DARING DOZEN

The conductorless string orchestra 12 Ensemble is celebrating its twelfth birthday with a new album, Metamorphosis. Founder members Max Ruisi and Eloise-Fleur Thom speak to David Kettle about the repertoire, and recording in London’s famous Abbey Road Studios

‘We put the piece on a pedestal for a long time – Eloisa and I both felt that, in the particular way we make music, it could be something really special. But we hadn’t felt ready. Also, we didn’t have the money to get 23 string players together…’

Max Ruisi, cellist in London-based string group the 12 Ensemble, is talking about Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, the darkly emotional centrepiece of the group’s new album, Metamorphosis – and a work that the musicians have wanted to tackle for some time. Indeed, it’s a sign of the 12 Ensemble’s longevity – Ruisi and violinist Eloisa-Fleur Thom co-founded the group twelve years ago, and continue as co-artistic directors – that a long-considered project has finally come to fruition.

The ensemble is now firmly established in the capital and beyond: its first two albums, Resurrection (2018) and Death and the Maiden (2020), were warmly received; it’s been house band for Oliver Leith’s opera Last Days at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre (2022); and it’s currently an ensemble-inresidence at Wigmore Hall.

But still, embarking on Metamorphosen feels like another thing entirely, especially with the 12 Ensemble’s well-rooted conductorless ethos. ‘We often get asked what we’ve got against conductors,’ Ruisi laughs. ‘Absolutely nothing, in fact – we just have a different way of working. We come at music as if we were a big string quartet, and make decisions within the group.’

RAPHAEL NEAL

‘WE COME AT MUSIC AS IF WE WERE A BIG STRING QUARTET, AND MAKE DECISIONS WITHIN THE GROUP’

That posed particular challenges, however, with a work on as large a scale as Metamorphosen, with its 23 solo parts (which expanded the Ensemble way beyond its customary twelve-strong team). ‘We knew what a task it would be, and we performed it live several times before the recording. It’s sometimes tough and time-consuming to discuss, for example, one particular player’s views on one particular bar. But it’s absolutely worth it because every musician feels invested in the performance, and everyone has thought about every note.’

Recording the Strauss for posterity still came with inevitable responsibilities, however, as Ruisi and Thom admit. ‘You’re laying it down for everyone to hear,’ explains Thom. ‘But we always try to treat the recording sessions like concerts anyway, with takes that are as long as we can manage. In the past, we’ve done whole movements with no edits in them.’ There are practical considerations to this way of working, too. ‘When you haven’t got a conductor, you’re so reliant from the intense sense of flow you get from all the players, but that can be exhausting,’ admits Ruisi.

Metamorphosen also supplies the new recording’s underlying themes of change and transformation. How did Ruisi and Thom go about selecting other repertoire to sit alongside that iconic piece? ‘We started thinking about biological metamorphosis, natural things that go through processes of change, and Claude Vivier’s Zipangu seemed to fit into that idea,’ explains Ruisi. ‘There’s something about it that feels like it’s always evolving – it takes one melody and just churns it through this spectral grinder of weirdness.’

The Canadian composer’s 1980 piece does indeed offer a deeply strange listening experience, drawing on Japanese kabuki theatre and Indian Carnatic music for inspiration, and colliding together a whole catalogue of extended string techniques with long, lush, winding melodies. ‘I only discovered the piece about two years ago,’ explains Ruisi, ‘but I had such a visceral reaction to the music that I thought: wow, we need to record this.’ That was, however, before Ruisi and Thom got to grips with the practicalities. ‘When we first got the score,’ Ruisi recalls, ‘I remember us both thinking: oh God, what have we done?’

The journey from conception to recording came down, they remember, to a lot of careful rehearsal and individual practice. ‘It’s really challenging, and initially the group was obviously thinking: what the hell is this? But they all bought into it and realised that it’s a really cool thing,’ says Ruisi. It’s also an important reflection of the 12 Ensemble’s musical identity, they feel. ‘We’re not a dedicated new-music group – we were recording Strauss at the same time, and we’ve been playing late Beethoven recently,’ Ruisi explains. ‘But we’re all very committed to exploring new repertoire, and even when we were making some frankly really odd sounds, everyone in the group was invested and took it seriously.’

That should come as little surprise: the 12 Ensemble already has close relationships with several British composers, two of whom – Oliver Leith and Edmund Finnis – provided the shorter pieces that complete the recording. ‘It’s a valuable connection to have when as a performer you feel you understand their language, and hopefully as composers they feel they can trust us,’ explains Thom.

In Finnis’s case, the composer himself reworked the penultimate movement of his First String Quartet especially for 12 Ensemble. ‘We felt that Ed’s music is so beautiful, and a beautiful way to begin an album – each chord is kind of holy and precious,’ explains Thom. ‘We bumped into him after a performance of the Quartet,’ Ruisi continues, ‘and told him how much we loved it. Then a few weeks later, a message popped up in our inbox: “thanks for that, and I thought I’d arrange a movement from it for the Ensemble.”’

Leith’s piece – Non voglio mai vedere il sole tramontare – is another reworking, this time of a faux-Italian aria from his opera Last Days, with Thom as solo violinist reinterpreting the vocal line. ‘We were part of the opera that the piece originally came from,’ she explains, ‘and playing the solo line, I already had in my mind what I wanted to do with it, knowing the words and the context in the plot.’

Both composers attended the recording sessions – perhaps a stressful presence, although Ruisi and Thom point out that it’s far better than sending out audio files and waiting for feedback. ‘There were no big shocks, because we work closely with them anyway,’ Ruisi explains. ‘We did a first take of Ollie’s piece and he said: “absolutely fantastic”. But we convinced him we maybe ought to do another one, and he said: “well, fine, if you really want to”. Ed’s a bit more precise about things, but even when it got to the editing process, it was just a case of fine-tuning a few little corners.’

The sessions took place across two days in April 2023, in one of the world’s most iconic recording venues: Abbey Road Studios. ‘It was a bit of a pinch-me moment, to be honest,’ Ruisi smiles. ‘We’d been there quite a few times recording film scores and things like that, but it’s something different to go in with your own project.’

But the venue only added to the excitement of the project as a whole; one emphasised by the closeness of all involved. ‘We were lucky to be collaborating again with our producer, Matthew Bennett, who worked on our last album,’ explains Thom. ‘When you have someone you trust, it makes what can be quite a complex experience very positive.’

And, according to Ruisi and Thom, it was a surprisingly smooth one too. ‘We started with the Vivier, to make sure we were on top of it,’ Ruisi admits. ‘We were prepared for a really gruelling session, but we actually finished ahead of time. Then we could start fresh the next day with the Strauss, and again we managed to wrap early. There was something special about the sessions – I think in sports they call it a purple patch, when everything just magically aligns.’

The 12 Ensemble recording in Studio Two at London’s Abbey Road

BRANDON SHEER

So much so, in fact, that it was only later that the players realised just how draining the sessions had been. ‘We were going at every take with a lot of energy,’ Ruisi remembers. ‘It’s almost like when there’s a crisis and you find a kind of superhuman strength. It was only when we got home in the evening that we realised how absolutely exhausted we were. But we were really touched by the number of players who emailed us afterwards to say how much the experience had reminded them about why they wanted to be musicians in the first place.’

WORKS

Finnis Hymn (after Byrd)

Vivier Zipangu

Leith Non voglio mai vedere il sole tramontare

Strauss Metamorphosen ARTISTS

12 Ensemble RECORDING VENUE

Abbey Road Studio Two, London, UK RECORDING DATES

5–6 April 2023 CATALOGUE NUMBER

Platoon STUDIOXII-01 RELEASE DATE

1 March 2024