Film Screening & Discussion
A film screening and a British-German panel exploring women composers: are things easier for them than in Fanny's day? And how are women changing the idea of what it is to be a composer, and what music is composed?
Sheila Hayman’s recent film
Fanny – The Other Mendelssohn is not only a gripping story about the re-attribution of a piece of music. It is above all a telling reminder of history’s poor record of remembering the work of women artists. Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister Fanny gained some recognition, late in life, of her great talent as a composer, but she was then almost forgotten for 130 years. The situation for women composers has improved since the mid-19th century, but still today 90% of classical concerts contain no work by women. Why? And what will it take to change things?
These and other questions will be discussed by BAFTA-winning film director
Sheila Hayman, composer and pianist
Electra Perivolaris, described as ‘One of a new generation of female trailblazers’ by BBC Radio 3, and
Lydia Rilling, the first female director of the Donaueschingen Music Days (Donaueschinger Musiktage), where in 2023 around 70 per cent of the works premiered were by female composers. Their conversation will be moderated by historian and writer
Leah Broad, whose 2023 award-winning book
Quartet portrays the lives of four British women composers born between 1856 and 1922.
Following the event, please join us for a reception.
About the Film
Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn is written and directed by Sheila Hayman, BAFTA winning director and the composer's three times great-granddaughter. It weaves together Fanny's life and the excavation of that life by determined scholars since the 1970s. In doing so, it uncovers the riveting detective story around the
Easter Sonata, a brilliant piano piece discovered in manuscript in 1972, recorded at that time as a lost work by Felix Mendelssohn, but, as the film unfolds, proved to be a masterpiece written by his older sister Fanny at the age of just 22. The film climaxes with the first public performance of the sonata by the young piano superstar Isata Kanneh-Mason. Joyful, funny, fascinating and heartbreaking by turns, it's the story of a very modern woman, who happened to live two centuries ago.
UK 2023, colour, 96 minutes, in English.
Director: Sheila Hayman, Executive Producers: Annabel Hobley, Maureen Murray, Alice Webb, Steve Condie, Producer: Sheila Hayman, Cinematographer: Lynda Hall, Editor: Evelyn Franks.
With Anna Beer, Éric Heidsieck, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Alison Langer, Angela R. Mace, Robinson McClellan, Chi-Chi Nwanoku
Please note that this event will start at 6.45pm and that we do not show any advertising before the film.
About the Speakers
Leah Broad is an award-winning music writer, historian, and broadcaster. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and writes about twentieth century cultural history, particularly women in music.
Quartet, her award-winning first book, is a group biography of four women composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell & Doreen Carwithen. Leah Broad regularly works with performers and institutions to reach out to new audiences, using storytelling to bring classical music to life.
Sheila Haman has written and directed dozens of documentary films for the BBC, Channel 4, ARTE, Beijing TV and others, winning a BAFTA and Time Out Documentary Series of the Year, and a Robert Kennedy award. She has been UK Young Journalist of the Year, the BAFTA/Fulbright Fellow in Los Angeles and a columnist for The Guardian, and is currently a Director’s Fellow of the MIT Media Lab. In 2020 she was Artist in Residence at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Her BBC film Mendelssohn,
The Nazis and Me was nominated for the Grierson Arts Documentary of the Year.
Electra Perivolaris is a composer and pianist from Scotland of mixed British and Greek heritage. Her music draws inspiration from her mixed Scottish and Greek island heritages, focusing on the natural world as a fragile living organism. Recent commissions have included works for the London Sinfonietta, BBC Singers, BBC Concert Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Aurora Orchestra, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Composers’ Hub. Electra Perivolaris has been awarded the Young Classical Artists Trust 2024-2025 Composer Fellowship in its inaugural year, composing new Wigmore Hall commissions for YCAT performers. Recent premieres include two performances of commissions composed for the BBC Concert Orchestra, one of which was a project with Streetwise Opera, creating an opera collaborating with The Magpie Project, a homeless shelter for women and children in East London. As Associate Composer for The Carice Singers, Electra’s new commission for the choir was premiered in the Holst 150 celebrations at St Martin-in-the-Fields in April 2024.
Lydia Rilling is a curator and musicologist specialising in contemporary music. Since 2022, she has been Artistic Director of Donaueschinger Musiktage, Germany’s oldest festival for new music. From 2016 to 2022, she was Chief Dramaturg at Philharmonie Luxembourg and directed the festival rainy days. Previously, she taught and conducted research in musicology at the University of Potsdam, prior to which she was invited as a visiting scholar to Columbia University in New York. As a writer, journalist and moderator she worked for institutions including Südwestrundfunk (SWR) and Berliner Festspiele. She studied Musicology and Comparative Literature in Berlin, Paris, and St. Louis.
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