Three Choirs Festival – get to know Marta Fontanals-Simmons

Your last performance with the Philharmonia was at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester in 2021. What do you enjoy most about the Festival?

It’s always a luxury to be able to make music with friends. There are members in the orchestra as well as our conductor Samuel Hudson who I’ve known for 10 years or more and it’s a joy to come together in such beautiful surroundings to share the performances with them.

Stanford’s Stabat Mater was celebrated by Vaughan Williams for its “imperishable beauty”. Do you have a favourite moment in the work?

I love the delicate and sinuous lines of the fourth movement. The falling chromaticism strangely calls to mind the ‘Quam Olim Abrahae’ section from Verdi’s Requiem. Even though it is of course a much more intimate moment, there is so much strength in the structured fragility that Stanford writes. I’m sure we’ll all be listening intently to each other in this section, bonding the moment further.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Tough to choose! So much of this profession is out of all of our hands, so focus your effort, time, love on the pursuit of musical greatness and the joy of collaboration rather than worrying what others think or chasing validation or accolades.

Do you have any pre-performance rituals?

Not too many, I don’t like to eat too much, but I’ll go through the score and take a quiet moment while I get my make up and hair ready. It’ll actually be my birthday on the day of the concert, so maybe I’ll blow out a couple of candles!

What three things are you listening to at the moment?

My three year old son likes to go to sleep listening to the Beatles, his favourites are Blackbird and Don’t Let Me Down so we alternate and leave on repeat. They’re now my most played songs on Spotify and yet bizarrely I’m still not sick of listening to them! My sleep album of choice on the other hand is José González’s Veneer, it gets me every time! My husband and I love collecting records and one of my favourites is Song for Our Daughter by Laura Marling. It has a Joni Mitchell sound and feels so warm and beautifully nostalgic, like a sonic hug. I become distracted if I listen to anything with words while I do admin and as an ex-violin player, I love string quartet music. My top two albums at the moment are Caroline Shaw’s Orange with Attacca Quartet and fellow Three Choirs favourite, Gavin Higgins’s Ekstasis with Piatti Quartet which I first heard at the Aldeburgh Festival and totally floored me!