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Composer Nicola LeFanu talks to Donald Macleod about her time in the Australian outback with composer David Lumsdaine

Composer Nicola LeFanu has been at the heart of British contemporary music for several decades, and at the forefront of promoting the works of her fellow women composers. In 2017 LeFanu turns seventy, and in conversation with Donald Macleod she looks back at her distinguished career including commissions from many leading artists. LeFanu also chats about some of the composers who have influenced her including her mother Elizabeth Maconchy, and also her husband David Lumsdaine.

During the 1970s and 1980s Nicola LeFanu made a number of visits to Australia. With fellow composer David Lumsdaine, they spent a long period of 1976 in the Outback, living and working in a location accessible only by boat. It was here that LeFanu composed her opera 'Dawnpath'. Once back in the UK, LeFanu established the composition department at King's College London, but by 1979, the same year she married David Lumsdaine, they both returned to Australia to the New South Wales Conservatory of Music as joint Composers-in-Residence. In 1984 came another visit to Australia. It was here that working for an entire month in the Outback, LeFanu was inspired to compose 'Moon Over the Western Ridge', written for the Rascher Saxophone Quartet. It was during this same period that LeFanu also composed 'The Old Woman of Beare', this time not inspired by the Australian landscape, but instead depicting the wild country of Ireland's west coast.

Preludio 2
Foundation Philharmonic Orchestra
David Snell, conductor

David Lumsdaine
Blue upon Blue
David Pereira, cello

Nicola LeFanu
Moon Over The Western Ridge
Rascher Saxophone Quartet

The Old Woman of Beare
Jane Manning, soprano
Lontano
Odaline de la Martinez, conductor

Producer Luke Whitlock.