Balancing music and family: 'Never underestimate the value of five minutes’

One of the thrills of freelance musical life is its unpredictability. In a semi-regulated profession in which one’s fortunes can rise and fall randomly like a game of Snakes & Ladders, opportunities can occur in unexpected ways. Rarely has this been truer for us than with our latest disc, Tournament for Twenty Fingers.

As a married couple, we have complementary yet contrasting careers: Emma performs as a pianist with a range of singers from the Royal Opera House as well as groups including the Sacconi Quartet and the Tippett Quartet. As artistic director of Cambridge Handel Opera Company and Sounds Baroque, Julian leans happily towards the Baroque and the Classical eras. Our home often has musical standoffs between countertenors on the first floor and bel canto beauties on the ground.

The Covid lockdowns proved to be unpredictable in ways that were anything but thrilling for musicians and many others. At first, however, there was an upbeat quality when we could enjoy the clement weather and take stock for what we thought might last a few weeks. It was against this backdrop that we conjured up a series of online home concerts. ‘Bach at 9’ saw Julian talk about and perform Bach’s 48 Preludes & Fugues at the clavichord over 48 evenings, while ‘Duets at 10’ was set up to explore our classical repertoire of piano duets. It was a way to keep match-fit and update our technological skills while earning some pocket money both for ourselves and our colleagues through the charity Help Musicians. It was a novelty back then, and Julian fondly remembers reading Roald Dahl’s The BFG to our two young boys before a five-second commute to indulge in Bach’s contrapuntal wizardry, donning (hidden) slippers.

We’re often asked how we balance our musical careers with home life. Our experiences preparing for this album have taught us that balance can be something of an illusion and that one shouldn’t be too precious about striving for the ideal working environment. Emma tackles times tables with Freddie before rehearsing Schumann’s piano quintet, while Julian lurches from practising Grade 2 violin pieces with Oscar to discussing the particularities of French Baroque ornamentation with fellow professionals. Such non sequiturs remind us of a postscript in a letter from Mozart to his sister: ‘Above us we have a violinist, below us is another, next to us a singing-master, who gives lessons, and, in the room opposite, a hautboy-player. This is famous for a composer – it inspires so many fine thoughts.’ Sarcastic perhaps, but the reality of having to work amidst relative chaos is nothing new and can even focus the mind. For us, going with the flow is certainly more enjoyable and productive than mounting defiant resistance.

But what on earth made us start this project in the midst of home-schooling our six-year-old boys? Those days were chaotic, happy, infuriating and exhausting all at the same time. We stayed focused by recalling Virginia Black’s advice from our time at music college: ‘Never underestimate the value of five minutes’. Instead of munching another chocolate biscuit between PE With Joe and online maths, we used these moments to explore new repertoire. Each micro-practice saw us focus on a single phrase with no time for chit-chat. It was like constructing a musical mosaic blindfolded but, to our surprise, we made progress and didn’t lose sight of the music’s overall shape.

If giving online concerts from home was a curious experience at first, it encouraged us to be playful with the music – though Emma is yet to be convinced that ornamenting twentieth-century pieces is kosher! One can’t be too formal when playing in slippers and – before we’re admonished for breaching performance protocol – we might remind ourselves that the piano duet originated as the medium for domestic music-making in the Western world during the nineteenth century. Before recordings were available, hands-on concertgoers would explore the symphonic repertoire at home through keyboard arrangements, often in duet form.

We embraced this attitude of playful intimacy when we recorded our programme at St George’s Bristol during a brief relaxation of lockdown regulations in November 2020. While this hall is somewhat larger than our front room, we treated it as one in which the listener eavesdrops on music-making as opposed to presenting a performance, drawing them in rather than projecting the sound out. In this capacity, we were blessed to have the hugely experienced John Taylor as our sound engineer, not least for fulfilling the specific audio requirements for BIS Records. Freed from the happy shackles of home life, we enjoyed uninterrupted hours of musical jousting.

Husband and wife duo Emma Abbate and Julian Perkins' latest album, Tournament for Twenty Fingers, is out now on BIS Records. You can find out more about this release here.