Lifetime Achievement

Erika Fox

In the 1970s and 80s, Erika Fox and her music were familiar presences on concert stages in London and around the UK. Her list of performances and musical associations reads like a who’s who of the scene at that time: the Fires of London, Jane Manning (a frequent singer of her music), the Nash Ensemble, Lontano, Dartington, Almeida … the list goes on. She won the Finzi Award (in 1983, for Kaleidoscope) and was nominated in 1991 for an Olivier Award (for the chamber opera The Dancer Hotoke). And then – in the mid-1990s, abruptly – she faded from view. She hadn’t stopped composing, but the times around her had changed. Fox no longer fit.

She was born in Vienna in 1936, into a Hasidic family of Hungarian/Romanian origin. Although she came to the UK as a war refugee at the age of two, her childhood was suffused with East European folk music, religious chant, ritual and dance. All of them fed into her compositional style, in particular her love of long, modal melodies, and her use of theatrical stage directions. It is little surprise that after her studies at the Royal College of Music she sought further lessons with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, although her music possesses a non-Western, spiritual intensity of its own.

Fox’s twenty-first-century re-emergence is thanks in large part to the enthusiams of the clarinettist and journalist Kate Romano, themselves sparked by a conversation with the composer Nicola LeFanu. Until recently only obscurely recalled by those who had been there, Fox’s music – appearing now with a restless, fluid modernity – can today be heard online and on her first portrait CD (at the age of 82), released this year on NMC. Hers is a lifetime achievement carried in the memory of an older generation and, finally, fitted to the present day.

Lifetime Achievement is presented in association with the Music Publishers Association.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson